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Payments and commerce
online-auction
online auction
eBay
System
Techniques · 16
Primitives · 64
online-auction
Actor model
concurrency · medium: Isolated units of state that interact only by queued messages and handle one at a time: no locks on state, and the same code runs local or remote.
›
Clock synchronization
distributed · medium: Estimate a clock's offset from four timestamps, filter out queueing noise, and steer the clock smoothly; NTP gets about a millisecond, PTP with hardware timestamps under a microsecond.
›
Deterministic simulation testing
distributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.
›
Primary-backup replication
distributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.
›
Pub/sub fan-out
distributed · medium: Deliver one published message to every subscriber of a topic by sharing one encoded payload and giving each connection a bounded queue with an explicit slow-consumer policy.
›
Payment state machine
finance · medium: Persisted state machine for a payment lifecycle (authorize, capture, void, refund) that treats timeouts as unknown, retries with the same key and applies webhooks idempotently.
›
Graph community detection
graphs · medium: Louvain/label propagation community detection for rings, fraud clusters and campaigns
Write-ahead log
storage · low: Append each change to a checksummed sequential log and fsync it before touching data pages; the basis of crash durability in nearly every database.
›
Event sourcing
finance · low: Persist state changes as an append-only stream of immutable events per entity; current state is a fold over them, guarded by expected-version appends.
›
Idempotency keys
finance · low: Client-chosen unique key per logical operation, stored with a request fingerprint and the final response, so retries replay the first result instead of acting twice.
›
Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Money representation
finance · low: Store money as integer minor units with an explicit currency exponent, compute in wider integers, and round once with a named rounding mode.
›
Proxy bidding
finance · low: Proxy bidding with bid increments: winner pays one increment above the second-highest max
Process supervision
hardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.
›
WebSockets
networking · low: Full-duplex message framing over one upgraded HTTP connection; the standard way to push real-time data to browsers.
›
Mutual TLS
security · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.
›
Optimistic concurrency control
storage · low: Run transactions without locks, record what they read, and validate at commit that nothing changed; fastest when conflicts are rare.
›
Graceful draining
systems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.
›
Hierarchical timing wheel
systems · low: Timers bucketed by expiry into wheels of slots, coarser wheels for far deadlines: O(1) insert and cancel for millions of timeouts.
›
Sliding-window counters
systems · low: Count events in the last W seconds with a ring of sub-bucket counters; the two-bucket weighted estimate gives rate limits in 16 bytes per key.
›
Cooperative scheduling
concurrency · low: Green threads/coroutines yielding at await points on a user-space scheduler
MPMC bounded queue
concurrency · low: Vyukov's array queue for many producers and consumers: each slot carries a sequence number, so one CAS per operation claims a slot without locks.
›
PID controller
robotics · low: Drive a measured value to a setpoint with three terms on the error: proportional, integral, derivative. The default feedback loop for motors, heaters, drones and gimbals.
›
+ 9 more techniques
+ 48 more primitives
System
Techniques · 16
Primitives · 64
online-auction
Actor model
concurrency · medium: Isolated units of state that interact only by queued messages and handle one at a time: no locks on state, and the same code runs local or remote.
›
Clock synchronization
distributed · medium: Estimate a clock's offset from four timestamps, filter out queueing noise, and steer the clock smoothly; NTP gets about a millisecond, PTP with hardware timestamps under a microsecond.
›
Deterministic simulation testing
distributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.
›
Primary-backup replication
distributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.
›
Pub/sub fan-out
distributed · medium: Deliver one published message to every subscriber of a topic by sharing one encoded payload and giving each connection a bounded queue with an explicit slow-consumer policy.
›
Payment state machine
finance · medium: Persisted state machine for a payment lifecycle (authorize, capture, void, refund) that treats timeouts as unknown, retries with the same key and applies webhooks idempotently.
›
Graph community detection
graphs · medium: Louvain/label propagation community detection for rings, fraud clusters and campaigns
Coverage-guided fuzzing
security · medium: Mutate inputs, run an instrumented target, and keep any input that reaches a new code edge; feedback turns blind guessing into incremental search.
›
Inverted index
storage · medium: Map each term to a sorted, compressed list of the documents containing it; the core of full-text search and other fast set queries.
›
Point-in-time recovery
storage · medium: Periodic base backups plus a continuously archived change log let you rebuild the state as of any instant, then branch from there.
›
Delta debugging
compilers · medium: Ddmin minimization of failing inputs or change sets
Work-stealing deque
concurrency · medium: Per-worker deque: the owner pushes and pops at the bottom without contention, idle workers steal from the top; the core of Rayon, Tokio and Go.
›
Fault injection
distributed · medium: Inject latency, errors, kills and partitions via proxies, netem or hooks
ARIES recovery
storage · medium: Three-pass crash recovery (analysis, redo, undo) for steal/no-force buffer pools; repeats history, then rolls back losers with compensation log records.
›
Syscall interception
security · medium: Intercept syscalls via ptrace, seccomp user notify or a user-space kernel
Buffer pool
storage · medium: The database's own page cache (frames, page table, pin counts, dirty bits, replacement) so it, not the OS, controls eviction, write order and I/O.
›
Write-ahead log
storage · low: Append each change to a checksummed sequential log and fsync it before touching data pages; the basis of crash durability in nearly every database.
›
Event sourcing
finance · low: Persist state changes as an append-only stream of immutable events per entity; current state is a fold over them, guarded by expected-version appends.
›
Idempotency keys
finance · low: Client-chosen unique key per logical operation, stored with a request fingerprint and the final response, so retries replay the first result instead of acting twice.
›
Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Money representation
finance · low: Store money as integer minor units with an explicit currency exponent, compute in wider integers, and round once with a named rounding mode.
›
Proxy bidding
finance · low: Proxy bidding with bid increments: winner pays one increment above the second-highest max
Process supervision
hardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.
›
WebSockets
networking · low: Full-duplex message framing over one upgraded HTTP connection; the standard way to push real-time data to browsers.
›
Mutual TLS
security · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.
›
Optimistic concurrency control
storage · low: Run transactions without locks, record what they read, and validate at commit that nothing changed; fastest when conflicts are rare.
›
Graceful draining
systems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.
›
Hierarchical timing wheel
systems · low: Timers bucketed by expiry into wheels of slots, coarser wheels for far deadlines: O(1) insert and cancel for millions of timeouts.
›
Sliding-window counters
systems · low: Count events in the last W seconds with a ring of sub-bucket counters; the two-bucket weighted estimate gives rate limits in 16 bytes per key.
›
Cooperative scheduling
concurrency · low: Green threads/coroutines yielding at await points on a user-space scheduler
MPMC bounded queue
concurrency · low: Vyukov's array queue for many producers and consumers: each slot carries a sequence number, so one CAS per operation claims a slot without locks.
›
PID controller
robotics · low: Drive a measured value to a setpoint with three terms on the error: proportional, integral, derivative. The default feedback loop for motors, heaters, drones and gimbals.
›
Phase-locked loop (digital)
signal-processing · low: Feedback loop that locks a local oscillator to the phase and frequency of an input tone; the core of carrier recovery, clock recovery and GNSS tracking.
›
Robust statistics
statistics · low: Location and scale estimates (median, MAD, trimmed mean, Huber M-estimator) that stay correct when a minority of the data is garbage.
›
Record replay
distributed · low: Record every nondeterministic input (time, randomness, I/O, model and tool outputs, per-tick player input) and re-execute deterministically for debugging, replays and state rebuild
PRNGs (PCG, xoshiro)
numerics · low: Small, fast, statistically strong non-cryptographic generators: PCG32 and xoshiro256**, with seeding, parallel streams and unbiased ranges.
›
Leases
distributed · low: A lock that expires on its own: bounded-time ownership that survives crashes and partitions, given bounded clock drift and fencing tokens on writes.
›
Health checking
systems · low: Decide per backend whether to route to it using probes and real-traffic errors, with consecutive-count hysteresis, capped ejection and a panic fallback.
›
SPSC ring buffer
data-structures · low: Bounded wait-free queue for exactly one producer and one consumer thread, built from an array and two indices with acquire/release ordering.
›
Topic matching trie
data-structures · low: Trie over topic levels with + and # wildcards for subscription matching
Backpressure
systems · low: Bound every queue and make a full queue push back on the producer by blocking, dropping, rejecting or withholding credit.
›
Exponential backoff with jitter
systems · low: Retry after delays that grow geometrically and are randomized, so failed clients spread out instead of hammering a recovering service in synchronized waves.
›
Hierarchical state machine
systems · low: Nest states so a substate inherits its parent's reactions and only overrides what differs, with ordered entry and exit actions along the path.
›
Union-find
graphs · low: Disjoint-set forest with union by size and path compression; merges sets and answers same-set queries in effectively constant time.
›
Sparse matrices (CSR)
numerics · low: Compressed sparse row stores only nonzeros as row pointers, column indices and values; SpMV streams them once, so it is memory-bandwidth bound.
›
Code coverage instrumentation
compilers · low: Insert counters into compiled code to record which blocks, edges or lines ran; a spanning tree of the control-flow graph cuts the counters needed.
›
Fast hash functions
data-structures · low: Non-cryptographic hashes built from 64×64→128-bit multiplies and xor-shifts; pick by key size, trust level and whether the hash is persisted.
›
Sanitizers
security · low: ASan/UBSan/TSan shadow memory and instrumentation to catch memory bugs
Bit packing and PFOR
compression · low: Store blocks of integers with exactly b bits each and patch rare outliers separately (PFOR); the fastest integer codec family, billions of values per second.
›
Delta encoding
compression · low: Store differences between consecutive values instead of the values, turning sorted IDs, timestamps and counters into small numbers that pack into few bits.
›
Varint (LEB128)
compression · low: Variable-length integers in 7-bit groups with a continuation bit; small numbers take 1 byte, the wire format of Protobuf, WebAssembly and DWARF.
›
BM25 ranking
search-sort · low: The standard lexical relevance score: IDF-weighted term frequency with saturation (k1) and length normalization (b); default in Lucene, Elasticsearch and SQLite FTS5.
›
Sorted-list intersection
search-sort · low: Intersect sorted id lists by merging, galloping from the short list into the long one, and skipping whole compressed blocks, shortest list first.
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Object storage
cloud · low: S3-compatible blob storage at cents per GB-month with 11 nines durability; pick by egress price, request price and latency, not by storage price alone.
›
Copy on write snapshots
storage · low: Point-in-time snapshots by sharing pages/extents and copying only on write
Failure bisection
search-sort · low: Binary search over commits, batches or inputs to isolate a failure
Epoch-based reclamation
concurrency · low: Threads announce a global epoch while touching shared lock-free data; garbage retired in epoch e is freed once the epoch reaches e + 2.
›
Memory ordering
concurrency · low: What Relaxed, Acquire, Release and SeqCst atomics actually guarantee, what they cost on x86 and ARM, and which one each pattern needs.
›
Transparent interception
networking · low: Redirect traffic to a local proxy (iptables TPROXY/REDIRECT, eBPF) without app changes
Ebpf
hardware-os · low: Verified in-kernel programs on hooks (kprobes, XDP, tc) with maps
Ptrace process control
hardware-os · low: Ptrace: attach, read and write registers and memory, single-step, intercept signals
Seccomp bpf
security · low: Syscall filtering with seccomp BPF programs
fsync, O_DSYNC and O_DIRECT
hardware-os · low: What fsync, fdatasync, O_DSYNC, O_DIRECT and F_FULLFSYNC really guarantee on Linux and macOS, and the exact call sequences for crash-safe files.
›
LRU and CLOCK
systems · low: LRU evicts the least recently used entry via hash map plus linked list; CLOCK approximates it with a reference bit, so hits take no lock.
›
S3-FIFO
systems · low: Three FIFO queues (small, main, ghost) that evict one-hit wonders quickly and keep reused objects; low miss ratios with no list moves on hits.
›
Control-flow graph
compilers · low: Split a linear instruction list into basic blocks and connect them by jumps; the graph every optimizer, SSA builder and dataflow pass walks.
›
False sharing
concurrency · low: Independent variables written by different cores on one cache line force the line to bounce between cores; pad or regroup hot data to fix it.
›
d-ary heap
data-structures · low: Array heap with d children per node (d = 4 typical): half the binary heap's depth, siblings in one cache line, faster priority queues.
›
Fencing tokens
distributed · low: A number that grows with every lock grant and is checked by the protected resource, so a paused ex-holder's late write is rejected.
›
Largest remainder rounding
finance · low: Splitting an amount into parts that sum exactly (largest remainder / Hamilton) for allocations, splits and prorations
BFS and DFS
graphs · low: The two basic graph traversals; BFS gives hop distances and levels, DFS gives discovery/finish order for cycles, components and topological order.
›
Minimum spanning tree
graphs · low: Cheapest set of edges connecting all vertices; Kruskal sorts edges and joins components with union-find, Prim grows one tree, Boruvka merges in parallel rounds.
›
CPU caches and the memory hierarchy
hardware-os · low: Sizes, line widths and latencies of L1/L2/L3/DRAM on modern x86 and Apple M-series, and the data-layout rules that follow from them.
›
CRC32C checksums
hardware-os · low: The Castagnoli CRC-32 with dedicated instructions on x86 (SSE4.2) and ARMv8. It is the standard fast integrity check for storage blocks, logs and network frames.
›
SIMD programming
hardware-os · low: Process 4-16 lanes per instruction with AVX2, AVX-512 or NEON via Rust std::arch, with runtime dispatch and a portable fallback.
›
Text normalization
machine-learning · low: Rewrite messy text into one canonical form for matchers and models, or into spoken words for speech output (and back), keeping a map to the original offsets.
›
Top-k selection
search-sort · low: Keep the k best of n items without sorting all n - bounded min-heap for streams, quickselect for arrays, threshold pruning to skip most items.
›
Unicode text tokenization for search
search-sort · low: Turn multilingual text into index terms: segment words (UAX 29 style, CJK bigrams), normalize, case-fold and accent-fold, identically at index and query time.
›
Cryptographic hashes (SHA-2, BLAKE3)
security · low: Collision-resistant fingerprints of data; SHA-256 for interoperability, BLAKE3 for speed, HMAC/HKDF for keyed uses.
›
Slab allocator
systems · low: Pre-carve pages into equal-size slots per size class with an in-place free list: O(1) alloc and free, no external fragmentation, cache-warm reuse.
›
Copy for AI
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