A load balancer can be better understood through a simple use case. Consider a basic client-server architecture where a client sends requests to a server, which processes them and returns a respons...

A proxy is an intermediary server that sits between a client and a destination server. Instead of communicating directly, the client talks to the proxy, which forwards the request on the client’s b...

Your product page takes 800ms to load. Most of that time is spent querying the same database rows, computing the same price calculations, and fetching the same product images that were served five ...

On June 2, 2019, Google Cloud Platform went down for four hours and twenty-five minutes. Snapchat, Shopify, Vimeo, Discord, and thousands of smaller services went with it. A single provider’s outag...

Latency and throughput are the two most important measures of the performance of a system. Latency Latency essentially measures the time it takes for data to travel through a system, specifically...

When two machines communicate over a network, they need to agree on the rules: how to find each other, how to structure the data, and what to do when something goes wrong. These agreed-upon rules a...

Data structures are the building blocks of efficient software. You do not need to know every one, but a solid grasp of the fundamentals and when to reach for each will take you a long way. This pag...

Imagine you need to store a million records and search through them efficiently. A sorted array gives you O(log n) search via binary search, but inserting a new element means shifting half the arra...

A social network where users follow each other. A city map where intersections are connected by roads. A dependency tree where packages depend on other packages. These are all graphs. A graph is o...

Java is always pass by value. No exceptions. The confusion arises because when you pass an object to a method, what gets passed is the value of the reference (the memory address of the object), no...