Read and writes in URL shortening problem

[Joel3]

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I’m unclear what the reads and writes are referring to in this question.

The explanation mentions that “Our system will be read-heavy. There will be lots of redirection requests compared to new URL shortenings.”. Also, “For write requests, since we expect 200 new URLs every second” whereas “For read requests, since every second we expect ~20K URLs redirections”.

Are we reading content from URLs that have been redirected? What are we writing?

Thanks.

[Joseph_S]

Writing means create a new shortened url and save it to the database, reading means get the original url given the shortened one. hope this helps