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System Design questions require understanding of core concepts and practice. PracHub provides solutions with explanations to help you master system design interviews.

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This is a medium difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Technical Screen rounds at Meta.

What role is this question designed for?

This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Meta during technical interviews.

Design Ticket Booking Auto Release | Meta Interview Question

Q: Design Ticket Booking Auto Release

This question evaluates system design competencies including distributed systems, data modeling, concurrency control, state machines, timeout/expiration mechanisms, and external payment integration within ticket inventory management.

System Design: Auto-expiring Ticket Reservations

Problem

Design a ticket-booking system where a reserved ticket automatically returns to the inventory if payment is not completed within 30 minutes.

Discuss and propose a design for:

Data model and state machine.
Reservation and payment flow.
Concurrency control to prevent overselling.
Timeout processing (auto-expiry) at scale.
Consistency guarantees and failure handling.

Assumptions

Tickets can be either seat-based (assigned seats) or general admission (GA) with a capacity count.
A reservation places a temporary hold for 30 minutes. If payment is completed within that window, the reservation becomes a purchase; otherwise, it expires and inventory is released.
High read/write throughput; horizontally scalable services.
Payment is processed by an external provider and can succeed/timeout/arrive late.

System Design: Auto-expiring Ticket Reservations

Problem

Design a ticket-booking system where a reserved ticket automatically returns to the inventory if payment is not completed within 30 minutes.

Discuss and propose a design for:

Data model and state machine.
Reservation and payment flow.
Concurrency control to prevent overselling.
Timeout processing (auto-expiry) at scale.
Consistency guarantees and failure handling.

Assumptions

Tickets can be either seat-based (assigned seats) or general admission (GA) with a capacity count.
A reservation places a temporary hold for 30 minutes. If payment is completed within that window, the reservation becomes a purchase; otherwise, it expires and inventory is released.
High read/write throughput; horizontally scalable services.
Payment is processed by an external provider and can succeed/timeout/arrive late.

Design Ticket Booking Auto Release

Quick Overview

System Design: Auto-expiring Ticket Reservations

Problem

Assumptions

Solution

Comments (0)

Design Ticket Booking Auto Release

Quick Overview

System Design: Auto-expiring Ticket Reservations

Problem

Assumptions

Solution

Comments (0)