Initial Design of Quora

Initial design

The initial design of Quora will be composed of the following building blocks and components:

• Web and application servers: A typical Quora page is generated by various services. The web and application servers maintain various processes to generate a webpage. The web servers have manager processes and the application servers have worker processes for handling various requests. The manager processes distribute work among the worker processes using a router library. The router library is enqueued with tasks by the manager processes and dequeued by worker processes. Each application server maintains several in-memory queues to handle different user requests. The following illustration provides an abstract view of web and application servers:

• Data stores: Different types of data require storage in different data stores. We can use critical data like questions, answers, comments, and upvotes/downvotes in a relational database like MySQL because it offers a higher degree of consistency. NoSQL databases like HBase can be used to store the number of views of a page, scores used to rank answers, and the extracted features from data to be used for recommendations later on. Because recomputing features is an expensive operation, HBase can be a good option to store and retrieve data at high bandwidth. We require high read/write throughput because big data processing systems use high parallelism to