Problems / Scaling, medium

Job scheduler: every job at the top of the minute

A distributed job scheduler runs 150 jobs a second on average, but every 10 seconds the cron schedules line up and 5× as many fire at once.

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Your goals

Success ≥ 99%, p99 ≤ 2 s.

Test cases

Like a coding problem, a solution has to pass every case, not just the one it was built for. Submit in the lab runs all 3; 1 of them are hidden until then.

  1. As given. The problem’s own traffic, scheduled failures and seed.
  2. A server dies. One replica of the service with the most replicas is killed for part of the run.

The traffic

150 requests a second, with 5× bursts every 10 s for 30 seconds: 100% reads.

The system

What each component does in this design, and what calls it. The simulator mimics each one from these settings.

ComponentIts job hereSettings
Load balancerLoad balancerTraffic enters here.Calls Scheduler.Layer 4 balancers route by IP and port; layer 7 balancers read HTTP and can route by path or header.–
SchedulerApp serviceLoad balancer forwards to it.Calls Job runners.Little's law: throughput ≈ concurrency ÷ latency. 200 slots at 50 ms serve about 4,000 req/s.3 replicas × 200 slots · timeout 4.0 s
Job runnersBatch job runnerScheduler calls it.Batch jobs process large data sets on a schedule rather than per request.60 slots

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