System Design Card 371 — Traffic Patterns / Breakdown
Concern
The read/write shape, burstiness, and fanout pattern determine the hot path and bottlenecks. A feed-read service with heavy fanout differs from a mostly write-once audit log.
What Breakdown means for this concern
In BASIC, the Breakdown step is where you clarify the product goal, workload shape, and non-functional requirement that will dominate the design. For Traffic Patterns, that means the candidate should make this concern visible at the right moment instead of bolting it on at the end.
Design move
A good move is to split the problem before trying to solve it. Tie the concern back to the user flow, the workload, and the dominant trade-off. That keeps the design grounded and makes it easier for the interviewer to follow why a cache, queue, replica, partition, or rate limiter is actually necessary.
Common miss
The miss is designing a generic system that ignores where the load actually concentrates. BASIC helps because the staged flow keeps this concern proportional to the prompt and connected to the rest of the architecture.
BASIC prompt
“When I reach the Breakdown stage, how does Traffic Patterns change the architecture, the trade-offs, or the review checklist?”