Design a disk-backed KV store under contention

Q: Design a disk-backed KV store under contention

This question evaluates understanding of disk-backed key–value storage design, including durability, on-disk layout and indexing, caching, concurrency control, and techniques for managing hot-key contention.

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Question

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System Design

Design a key–value store where:

Values can be very large , so they must be stored primarily on disk .
The interviewer is especially focused on how you handle high contention (many concurrent readers/writers, potentially hot keys).

Requirements

Specify and design for:

APIs: Put(key, value) , Get(key) , Delete(key) (optionally CAS/CompareAndSet ).
Durability guarantees (what is acknowledged on Put ?).
Concurrency: many threads/clients can call APIs simultaneously.
Correctness expectations under concurrent access.

What to cover

On-disk data layout and indexing strategy.
Caching strategy.
Write path (including durability) and read path.
Techniques to reduce lock contention / handle hot keys.
How you would implement acquire/release locking (or alternatives).

Design a disk-backed KV store under contention

Quick Overview

System Design

Requirements

What to cover

Solution

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