Scale Duplicate File Detection
Company: Anthropic
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
You have implemented a local duplicate-file finder. It works correctly on small inputs but becomes very slow on a large file system. How would you diagnose the performance issue, and how would you redesign the solution for a distributed environment with many machines and a very large number of files?
Quick Answer: This question evaluates understanding of scalable system design, performance diagnosis, and distributed systems concepts as applied to large-scale file management.