Most people think system design is about building the “best” architecture. It’s not—instead, it’s about making the right tradeoffs for a given workload and constraints.

Explore the system design tradeoffs below. Click any card to view its breakdown.


1. Performance, Latency & Throughput

// PERFORMANCE & THROUGHPUT

1. Latency vs Throughput

Batching requests increases throughput by reducing overhead, but individual requests wait longer while batches form...

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// LATENCY DISTRIBUTION

2. Latency vs Tail Latency

A system can have great median latency while slow outlier requests degrade p95 and p99 performance...

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// RESOURCE EFFICIENCY

3. Compression vs CPU Usage

Compressing data saves bandwidth and storage space at the cost of higher CPU utilization and processing overhead...

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