Grokking the System Design Interview
Ask Author
Back to course home

0% completed

Vote For New Content
Collapsed Forwarding

Shubham Saxena

Aug 25, 2024

"In addition to coordinating requests from multiple servers, proxies can also optimize request traffic from a system-wide perspective. Proxies can combine the same data access requests into one request and then return the result to the user; this technique is called collapsed forwarding. Consider a request for the same data across several nodes, but the data is not in cache. By routing these requests through the proxy, they can be consolidated into one so that we will only read data from the disk once."

Didnt quite catch this. Can this be explained with a better example?

2

0

Comments
Comments
Dima Nahornyi
Dima Nahornyia year ago

I believe this confusion caused by lack of one detail: this is about simultaneous requests for the same content from different users through a single proxy.

Abhishek Kumar Gupta
Abhishek Kumar Gupta6 months ago

Imagine 10 clients request the same data at the same time:

  1. The proxy receives 10 identical requests.
  2. The data is not in the cache.
  3. The proxy sends 10 separate requests to the backend (e.g., disk or origin server).
  4. This causes:
    • Redundant lo...