System Design: Real-Time Top-K Frequency Monitoring

Concepts: pyTopKSystem, pySketchMerge, pySlidingTopK, pyDistributedFreq

This is the capstone system design question for frequency counting at advanced level. 'Design a system that can answer top-K most frequent events over a sliding time window, with sub-second query latency and support for millions of events per second.' This question appears in staff and senior staff interviews. It synthesizes Count-Min Sketch, heap-based top-K maintenance, sliding window expiry, and distributed sketch merging. Let's build it piece by piece. Component Architecture Distributed Extension: Merging Sketches In a staff-level system design interview, you do not need to code all of this. You need to articulate the architecture clearly: Count-Min Sketch for frequency estimation, min-heap for top-K maintenance, time-bucketed sketches for sliding window expiry, and element-wise additi