5. Nearby Friends
Medium
Design a scalable backend system for a mobile phone app called “nearby friends” that lets users see which friends are nearby
- Functional Requirements
- Users should be able to see when one of their friends is within some configurable geographical range.
- List of friends within range should be updated every few seconds
- The app will allow users to see 10 nearby friends per page and has the option to load an additional 10 friends upon request from the user
- The app displays nearby friends in order of how close they are (added step)
- Nonfunctional Requirements
- 1000ms latency
- System should be reliable, but some infrequent data point loss is okay
- Eventual consistency. The location data store doesn’t need strong consistency.
- Assumptions
- location refresh interval should be no shorter than 60 seconds
- nearby friend range is configurable by each user
- The number of concurrent users is 15% of the daily active users
- The average user of the nearby friends app has 300 friends
- The app will allow users to see 10 nearby friends per page and has pagination enabled
- Estimated Usage
- 65 million users per day
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