SDPD — Systems Design Police Department

2026-06-15 · source · source ↗ · wiki page

The city of Distributia runs on distributed systems. Things keep breaking. Diagnose failures. Design solutions. Solve cases.

ROOKIE RANK — 0/33 CASES — 0% CLEARED

Case Categories

Replication & Redundancy (0/3)

  1. The Single Point of Failure — Criminal records go dark across all precincts
  2. The Stale Read — An officer arrests someone on a dismissed warrant
  3. The Lost Evidence — 16 crime scene photos vanish into thin air

Consistency & Consensus (0/5)

  1. The Split Brain — Two precincts, two truths, one broken network
  2. The Phantom Vote — Evidence room lockdown fails as multiple nodes claim leadership
  3. The Conflicting Orders — Two leaders, two assignments, one very confused officer
  4. The Time Traveler's Dilemma — Evidence timestamps defy the laws of physics
  5. The Byzantine Witness — A rogue forensics node lies to everyone — differently

Load Balancing & Scaling (0/5)

  1. The Overwhelmed Gateway — City-wide emergency brings the single gateway to its knees
  2. The Thundering Herd — Every precinct stampedes the database at the same moment
  3. The Hot Partition — One shard drowns while the others sit idle
  4. The Vertical Limit — Crime analytics server hits its hardware ceiling
  5. The Sticky Situation — Server crash wipes out hundreds of active officer sessions

Caching (0/4)

  1. The Ghost Record — A deleted criminal record keeps haunting the system
  2. The Cache Avalanche — All cache entries expire simultaneously, crushing the database
  3. The Dog Pile — Hundreds of requests stampede to rebuild a single cache entry
  4. The Stale Menu — CDN serves outdated Most Wanted list hours after update

Messaging & Queues (0/4)

  1. The Lost Dispatch — Server crash loses all pending dispatch calls from the queue
  2. The Double Arrest — Duplicate message delivery causes the same warrant to be processed twice
  3. The Backed Up Pipeline — Dispatch queue overflows as consumer service crashes silently
  4. The Out of Order — Crime reports arrive jumbled as parallel consumers scramble the sequence

Distributed Storage (0/4)

  1. The Missing Shard — An entire letter range of criminals vanishes from the database
  2. The Inconsistent Lineup — Two precincts see different versions of the same suspect at the same time
  3. The Corrupted Archive — Evidence arrives corrupted but nobody knows where the damage happened
  4. The Overloaded Vault — Write-heavy evidence logging causes massive storage amplification

Network & Communication (0/4)

  1. The Timeout Trap — A slow downstream service triggers cascading timeouts across the entire system
  2. The Retry Storm — One failed request becomes a million knocking at the door
  3. The Circuit Breaker — One fallen domino topples the entire dispatch center
  4. The DNS Disaster — When a server moves and nobody gets the new address

Advanced Patterns (0/4)

  1. The Deadlock District — Two services locked in an eternal standoff
  2. The Phantom Read — The crime statistics that changed mid-count
  3. The Saga Failure — A booking process that forgot how to undo its mistakes
  4. The Rate Limiter — One integration floods the system, drowning everyone else