System design

Advanced

Stop the scrapers

Bots are scraping every product page of a retailer, and at 14:00 they will multiply by five. Keep real customers fast while blocking the bots.

A real visitor makes about 3 requests per second at most; a scraper makes hundreds. Blocking real visitors counts as errors.

What your design must achieve

  • Abusive traffic let through < 10 %
  • Availability ≥ 99.9 %
  • Latency p99 < 200 ms

What you will master