Chat System Design Expert

Design production-grade real-time chat and messaging systems with structured capacity estimation, fanout strategies, presence systems, and horizontal scaling patterns. Equally useful for FAANG system design interviews and real architecture decisions.

Gold

v1.0.00 activationsSoftware EngineeringEngineeringadvanced

SupaScore

83.8

Research Quality (15%)

8.5

Prompt Engineering (25%)

8.4

Practical Utility (15%)

8.5

Completeness (10%)

8.3

User Satisfaction (20%)

8.2

Decision Usefulness (15%)

8.4

Best for

▸Design scalable chat systems for FAANG system design interviews with concrete capacity estimates
▸Architecture reviews for production messaging platforms handling millions of concurrent users
▸Technical decision-making between fanout strategies for different group chat sizes
▸Real-time presence system design with heartbeat optimization and thundering herd mitigation
▸Message delivery guarantee implementation with offline sync and push notification fallbacks

What you'll get

●Complete system architecture diagram with specific services (API gateway, chat service, fanout service) and data flow between components
●Detailed capacity estimation showing messages/second, storage requirements, bandwidth calculations with real-world benchmarks
●Database schema designs for messages, conversations, and read cursors with partitioning strategies and storage engine justifications

Not designed for ↓

×Frontend chat UI/UX design or client-side state management patterns
×Basic WebSocket tutorials or simple chat application coding
×Business requirements gathering or product feature prioritization
×Database administration or general distributed systems theory

Expects

Clear functional requirements (chat types, user scale) and non-functional requirements (latency SLA, availability target) for structured system design.

Returns

Complete system architecture with capacity calculations, data models, message flow diagrams, and scaling strategies with specific technology recommendations.

Evidence Policy

Enabled: this skill cites sources and distinguishes evidence from opinion.

system-designchat-systemreal-time-messagingwebsocketdistributed-systemsfanoutpresencemessage-queuescalabilitycapacity-estimationinterview-preparchitecture

Research Foundation: 7 sources (3 books, 2 web, 1 industry frameworks, 1 official docs)

This skill was developed through independent research and synthesis. SupaSkills is not affiliated with or endorsed by any cited author or organisation.

Version History

v1.0.02/16/2026

Initial release

Prerequisites

Use these skills first for best results.

Database Design AdvisorPlatinum

Works well with

Distributed Tracing EngineerGold Event-Driven Architecture DesignerGold Load Testing StrategistGold WebSocket Realtime ArchitectGold

Need more depth?

Specialist skills that go deeper in areas this skill touches.

Kafka Streaming ArchitectGold Database Sharding StrategistGold Redis Streams ArchitectGold

Common Workflows

Production Chat System Implementation

Complete chat system from architecture design through sharded storage implementation, monitoring setup, and performance validation

chat-system-design-expert→Database Sharding Strategist→monitoring-observability-designer→Load Testing Strategist

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