Grokking the System Design Interview
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quil
How come r < w if better performance?

quil

Dec 9, 2023

The following explanation doesn't make sense to me: "Best performance (throughput/availability) when 1< r < w < n, because reads are more frequent than writes in most applications". Since reads are more frequent, wouldn't it make sense that r > w?

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drjonathankha a year ago

I had to read that again as I second guessed myself too. Think of the values of r and w as the actual number of "success" messages needed from individual replicas to consider the whole read or write complete. In the case of 1<r this is good because it relies on at least...

 Vladyslav
Vladyslav2 months ago

If I understand correctly, there are no dedicated nodes for reading or writing — each node can do both. When a user makes a read request, we redirect it to R replicas and wait for responses from them. Waiting for responses from 2 nodes would normally take less time than...