System Design

Live Polling at Viral Scale

System Design diagram · made in Skemio

Architecture diagram for viral live polling showing clients sending batched votes through an API Gateway to vote ingestion workers, writing to partitioned Redis shards, then to aggregation workers and PostgreSQL.
Architecture diagram for viral live polling showing clients sending batched votes through an API Gateway to vote ingestion workers, writing to partitioned Redis shards, then to aggregation workers and PostgreSQL.
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What it shows

  • Clients buffer votes locally for 2-5s to eliminate hot HTTP request floods.
  • Redis counter shards split vote tallies across keys to avoid hot-key stalls.
  • Async aggregation workers flush batched snapshots to PostgreSQL every 5s.

The takeaway

Absorb spikes by batching at the client and partitioning hot counters in memory.

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