#14X (Twitter) Real-Time Trending Topics
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WorkflowCanvas
Twitter / X logoTwitter / X System
MediumData Systems
35–50 min

X (Twitter) Real-Time Trending Topics

Design a real-time stream processing pipeline to identify velocity spikes in hashtags and topics across regions with decay algorithms to prevent stale trends.

Scale & Traffic500M tweets/day · 5-minute sliding trend detection
Monthly Cloud Budget$20,000/month
Latency Target (P99)< 50ms Realtime SLA
Availability SLA99.99% Multi-AZ Active
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System Requirements

  • Detect trending topic spikes within 60 seconds of real-world events
  • Filter spam, bot coordinated bursts, and sensitive keywords
  • Localize trends by country, city, and user interest graph
  • Exponential time-decay algorithm to retire fading topics

Graded Constraints

01Budget: $20,000/month
02Distributed event streaming (Kafka) for tweet stream ingestion
03Stream processing compute cluster
04Fast in-memory cache for regional top-50 leaderboards
05NoSQL / Relational database for historical trend archival

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X (Twitter) Real-Time Trending Topics — System Design Problem | Mimir Nest