We are doing perf testing right now, and we are looking into real world datasets to play around with. Luckily for us, Stackoverflow have regular data dump of size significant enough to be useful for our experiments.

The file that I’m currently looking it is the Posts.xml file, which is about 45GB in size, and looks roughly like this (lot of stuff removed to make the point).

Since Stackoverflow is using relational database, their output is also relational. You can see that each element is a single row, and you have the ParentId in row #7 that points back to row #4.

Basically, row #4 is the question, and row #7 is one of the answers.

What I want it to take all of this data and move it into a more document format. In other words, what I want to have all the answers for a question contained within the question, something like this:

The fun part here is that this is a pretty big file, and we are writing the output into a GzipStream, so we don’t really have the option of saving / modifying midway through. Once we have written something out to the GzipStream, it cannot be changed.

So we need to find a way in which we can group all the answers under their questions, but at the same time, the file size is big, much bigger than the memory I have available, so we can’t just keep it all in memory and write it out in the end.

How would you solve this issue? My attempt is currently sitting at roughly 10GB of RAM used after processing about 30GB of XML, but I have to admit that I have thrown it together rather quickly, since I just needed the data and a quick & dirty solution is just fine here.

This is something that goes into the “what to ask a candidate”.

Given the following class:

public class Indexer
{
    private Dictionary<string, List<string>> terms = 
        new Dictionary<string, List<string>>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase);

    public void Index(string docId, string text)
    {
        var words = text.Split();
        foreach (var term in words)
        {
            List<string> val;
            if (terms.TryGetValue(term, out val) == false)
            {
                val = new List<string>();
                terms[term] = val;
            }
            val.Add(docId);
        }
    }

    public List<string> Query(string term)
    {
        List<string> val;
        terms.TryGetValue(term, out val);
        return val ?? new List<string>();
    }
}

This class have the following tests:

public class IndexTests
{
    [Fact]
    public void CanIndexAndQuery()
    {
        var index = new Indexer();
        index.Index("users/1", "Oren Eini");
        index.Index("users/2", "Hibernating Rhinos");

        Assert.Contains("users/1", index.Query("eini"));
        Assert.Contains("users/2", index.Query("rhinos"));
    }

    [Fact]
    public void CanUpdate()
    {
        var index = new Indexer();
        index.Index("users/1", "Oren Eini");
        //updating
        index.Index("users/1", "Ayende Rahien");

        Assert.Contains("users/1", index.Query("Rahien"));
        Assert.Empty(index.Query("eini"));
    }
}

The first test passes, but the second fails.

The task is to get the CanUpdate test to pass, while keeping memory utilization and CPU costs as small as possible. You can change the internal implementation of the Indexer as you see fit.

After CanUpdate is passing, implement a Delete(string docId) method.

We are still in a hiring mode. And today we have completed a new question for the candidates. The task itself is pretty simple, create a form for logging in or creating a new user.

Seems simple enough, I think. But there is a small catch. We’ll provide you the “backend” for this task, which you have to work with. The interface looks like this:

public interface IUserService
{
        void CreateNewUser(User u);
 
        User GetUser(string userId);
}

public class User
{
   public string Name {get;set;}
   public string Email {get;set;}
   public byte[] Sha1HashedPassword {get;set;}
}

The catch here is that we provide that as a dll that include the implementation for this, and as this is supposed to represent a 3rd party service, we made it behave like that. Sometimes the service will take a long time to run. Sometimes it will throw an error (ThisIsTuesdayException), sometime it will take a long time to run and throw an error, etc.

Now, the question is, what is it that I’m looking to learn from the candidate’s code?