URL Shortening Service

Question 1

How long might a URL string be?

Answer 1

500 bytes

Question 2

How many bytes needed to store one alpha-numeric character?

Answer 2

1 byte

Question 3

With base64 encoding, how many letters are encoded to for each letter? Can you determine how many possible combinations you have for a 6 letter url?

Answer 3

Each letter is encoded to 6 letters

Combinations are 64 ^ 6 = ~68.7 billion possible strings

Question 4

What is Memcashed? What is it for?

Answer 4

A general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. Memcached’s APIs provide a very large hash table distributed across multiple machines. When the table is full, subsequent inserts cause older data to be purged in least recently used (LRU) order

Question 5

HTTP code for redirect?

Answer 5

302 redirect