面试题库

分析过程 · 先想清楚再作答

1. 这题有两个题眼，很多人只答了前一个。第一个是「怎么判断」（细节题），第二个是「放在哪一步」（架构题），后者才是拿分点。
2. 先讲 quiet hours 的判断。把时刻折成从午夜起算的分钟数之后，绝大多数人第一次都会写成 start 小于等于 now 且 now 小于 end。这对午休那种同日区间是对的，对 22:00 到 08:00 恒为 false——start 是 1320、end 是 480，条件永远不成立，于是半夜照发。正确写法是 start 小于 end 时用「且」，start 大于 end（跨午夜）时换成「或」。这个 bug 恶劣在只在跨午夜的配置上错，用 13:00 到 14:00 写的单元测试全绿。
3. 接着是命中之后怎么办：推迟，不是丢弃。判据不该由发送方临时决定，而应该由消息自己带一个过期时刻——过期时刻早于窗口结束的丢弃，其余一律推迟到窗口结束。限时取消提醒过了今晚就没意义，账单提醒明早发一样有效。另外要提一句惊群：所有推迟的消息会算出同一个到期时刻，要加一个按用户标识哈希得出的抖动（不能用随机数，否则线上复现不了）。
4. 再讲每日上限的两个细节。一是「一天」必须是**用户本地日历日**，写成 UTC 日的话东八区用户早上八点前发的会算进昨天的额度。二是必须先占坑再判断——原子自增拿返回值比上限，超了再把名额还回去；先查后写在并发下两条候选会同时读到同一个值然后一起发出去。渠道明确拒绝时也要把名额还回去。
5. 最后是架构题那一半，也是最值钱的一段：三道闸必须在**生成内容之前**判断，不是在发送那一步。顺序错了程序照样跑通、发出的消息也一样，唯一区别是每条被拦下的消息你都已经付过一次模型调用的钱。按 1000 用户每天各 3 条候选、拦掉四成、单条约 0.00075 美元算，一个月白花约 27 美元，比这批用户的正常对话开销还高，而且监控上完全看不出来——只有把候选数和实际发送数并排摆出来才看得见差额。
6. 可以预期的追问：三道闸内部谁先谁后？答时区、安静时段、每日上限，上限必须最后。因为被安静时段推迟的消息明早才发，不该占掉今天的名额；顺序反了用户会发现自己明明没收到几条却被限流了。

How to reason about it · think before answering

1. There are two hinges here and most candidates only answer the first. One is how to evaluate the rules (a details question), the other is where in the pipeline (an architecture question) — the second is where the points are.
2. Start with quiet hours. Once you fold times into minutes-from-midnight, almost everyone first writes start less-or-equal now and now less-than end. That is correct for a same-day window like a lunch break, but for 22:00 to 08:00 it is always false: start is 1320, end is 480, the condition never holds, and you push at 3am. The fix is to use and when start is before end, and or when start is after end. What makes this bug nasty is that it only misfires on the cross-midnight config, so a unit test written around 13:00 to 14:00 passes.
3. Then what to do on a hit: defer, do not drop. The decision should not be the sender's mood — attach an expiry to each candidate and drop only when it expires before the window ends, deferring everything else to the window's end. A thirty-minute cancellation warning is worthless tomorrow; a billing summary is just as valid at 8am. Mention the thundering herd too: every deferred message resolves to the same due instant, so add jitter derived from a hash of the user id, never a random number, or you cannot reproduce incidents.
4. Now two details on the daily cap. First, the day must be the user's local calendar day; keying on the UTC date charges an East-Asian user's 8am message to yesterday's budget. Second, increment first and check the returned value, then give the slot back if it exceeded — a read-then-write races, letting two candidates read the same count and both go out. Return the slot on a hard rejection from the channel as well.
5. Finish with the architecture half, which is the valuable part: all three gates must run before the content is generated, not at the send step. Get the order wrong and the program still works and sends the same messages; the only difference is that you paid for a model call on every message you then threw away. At 1000 users, three candidates each per day, forty percent blocked and roughly $0.00075 per message, that is about $27 a month wasted — more than the normal conversational spend for the same cohort — and it is invisible in monitoring. Only putting candidate count next to sent count reveals the gap.
6. Expect: what order do the three gates run in? Timezone, quiet hours, daily cap, with the cap last. A message deferred to tomorrow morning must not consume today's quota; reverse the order and users get rate-limited despite having received almost nothing.

分析过程 · 先想清楚再作答

1. 这题的题眼是「共用」两个字。只回答一个令牌桶算答了一半，面试官想听的是你按什么维度分桶、以及桶之外还需要什么。
2. 先给维度：限流要按「厂商 + 接口类别」分桶，不能全局一个桶。同一家的图像和语音是两个独立的配额池，混在一起会让紧的那个把松的那个也拖住。
3. 再给部件：一个桶不够，要两个。令牌桶管速率（一分钟发几次，数字是厂商定的），信号量管并发（同一时刻挂着几个，数字是你自己定的用来保护内存和钱包）。只有速率控制的话，快速返回的接口一分钟能发几百次；只有并发控制的话，二十个请求同时在飞会把内存挂满。
4. 然后是关键的工程细节：拿许可的动作必须是非阻塞的。如果任务先被派出去、再在执行流里等令牌，工作槽会被一批低优先任务占死，优先级就静默失效了。正确结构是调度器派活之前先问闸门要许可，拿不到就跳过它去看下一个候选。
5. 最后落到取值：并发上限不该按 CPU 核数定，这条线几乎没有本地计算，全在等网络；它该按「一次失败要重跑多少东西」和厂商配额来定。
6. 可预期的追问是「桶的状态放哪」。单进程放内存就够；多进程要放 Redis，用一个原子脚本取令牌，否则每个进程各限各的，加起来照样超。

How to reason about it · think before answering

1. The hinge is the word shared. Naming a token bucket only answers half of it; the interviewer wants your bucketing dimension and what else sits around the bucket.
2. Dimension first: bucket per vendor and per API family, never one global bucket. Image and speech quotas at the same vendor are separate pools, and merging them lets the tight one throttle the loose one.
3. Then the parts: one bucket is not enough. A token bucket caps rate (calls per minute, a number the vendor sets); a semaphore caps concurrency (how many are in flight, a number you set to protect memory and spend). Rate alone lets a fast endpoint fire hundreds per minute; concurrency alone lets twenty downloads pile up.
4. The engineering detail that decides everything: admission must be non-blocking. If a job is dispatched first and then waits for a token inside the worker, low-priority work pins every worker slot and priority silently stops working. Ask the gate before dispatch, and skip to the next candidate when it says no.
5. Finally the numbers: concurrency should not track CPU cores, since this pipeline is almost all network wait. Derive it from vendor quota and from how much work one failure forces you to redo.
6. Expected follow-up: where does bucket state live. In-memory is fine for one process; across processes it belongs in Redis behind an atomic token-take script, or each process limits itself and the sum still blows the quota.