svranesevic / maze-backend-challenge

SoundCloud coding challenge solution

The Challenge

The challenge proposed here is to build a system which acts as a socket server, reading events from an event source and forwarding them when appropriate to user clients.

Clients will connect through TCP and use the simple protocol described in a section below. There will be two types of clients connecting to your server:

• One event source: It will send you a stream of events which may or may not require clients to be notified
• Many user clients: Each one representing a specific user, these wait for notifications for events which would be relevant to the user they represent

The Protocol

The protocol used by the clients is string-based (i.e. a CRLF control character terminates each message). All strings are encoded in UTF-8.

The event source connects on port 9090 and will start sending events as soon as the connection is accepted.

The many user clients will connect on port 9099. As soon as the connection is accepted, they will send to the server the ID of the represented user, so that the server knows which events to inform them of. For example, once connected a user client may send down: 2932\r\n, indicating that they are representing user 2932.

After the identification is sent, the user client starts waiting for events to be sent to them. Events coming from event source should be sent to relevant user clients exactly like read, no modification is required or allowed.

The Events

There are five possible events. The table below describe payloads sent by the event source and what they represent:

Payload	Sequence #	Type	From User Id	To User Id
666|F|60|50	666	Follow	60	50
1|U|12|9	1	Unfollow	12	9
542532|B	542532	Broadcast	-	-
43|P|32|56	43	Private Msg	32	56
634|S|32	634	Status Update	32	-

Using the verification program supplied, you will receive exactly 10000000 events, with sequence number from 1 to 10000000. The events will arrive out of order.

Note: Please do not assume that your code would only handle a finite sequence of events, we expect your server to handle an arbitrarily large events stream (i.e. you would not be able to keep all events in memory or any other storage)

Events may generate notifications for user clients. **If there is a user client ** connected for them, these are the users to be informed for different event types:

• Follow: Only the To User Id should be notified
• Unfollow: No clients should be notified
• Broadcast: All connected user clients should be notified
• Private Message: Only the To User Id should be notified
• Status Update: All current followers of the From User ID should be notified

If there are no user client connected for a user, any notifications for them must be silently ignored. user clients expect to be notified of events in the correct order, regardless of the order in which the event source sent them.

Test Client

You can find the test client in the client folder. It will initialize both event source client on port 9090 and user clients on port 9099.

To run it use:

./followermaze.sh

The Configuration

During development, it is possible to modify the test program behavior using the following environment variables:

1. logLevel - Default: info

   Modify to "debug" to print debug messages.

2. eventListenerPort - Default: 9090

   The port used by the event source.

3. clientListenerPort - Default: 9099

   The port used to register clients.

4. totalEvents - Default: 10000000

   Number of messages to send.

5. concurrencyLevel - Default: 100

   Number of connected users.

6. numberOfUsers Default: concurrencyLevel * 10

   Total number of users (connected or not)

7. randomSeed - Default: 666

   The seed to generate random values

8. timeout - Default: 20000

   Timeout in milliseconds for clients while waiting for new messages

9. maxEventSourceBatchSize - Default: 100

   The event source flushes messages in random batch sizes and ramdomize the messages order for each batch. For example, if this configuration is "1" the event source will send only ordered messages flushing the connection for each message.

10. logInterval - Default: 1000

The interval in milliseconds used to log the sent messages counter.

Design

Testing

Unit tests

cd server
go test

Integration test

Start server

go run cmd/main.go

Start event source and clients

time java -server -Xmx1G -jar ./client/follower-maze-2.0.jar