Design a ticketing purchase system
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This question evaluates understanding of large-scale system design and distributed systems concepts, including concurrency control, consistency models, real-time fanout, payment idempotency, and failure handling for high-concurrency ticketing with interactive seat maps.
Design a high-concurrency ticket purchasing system for events with seat maps. Requirements: seat selection, seat holds with TTL, preventing oversells under spikes, wait queues, payments with idempotency and retries, refunds/chargebacks, anti-bot measures and rate limiting, audit logs, and real-time availability updates. Discuss data model, APIs, locking strategy (pessimistic vs. optimistic), consistency model, scaling (sharding, caching), and failure handling.
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