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Quorum Wiki

The player's guide to Quorum. Learn what each Component does, why your Design breaks, and how to fix it, with live views from the game.

Start your first CompanyBrowse the ComponentsOpen source on GitHub
38
Components
203
Research items
8
Eras
56
Incidents
18
Sandboxes
136
Engineering terms

Something is going wrong

Start from the symptom you see in the game.

Find the bottleneckFind the one Node that limits your Design, learn which of its resources is full and why, and pick the fix that moves the limit.Read p99 and tail latencyRead the p99 on the HUD, the Users Node, and each card, find the request kind and the Node that make the tail, and pick the fix for its cause.Scale the databaseRead which limit the Database hits, then take load off it with a larger box, a Pooler, a Cache, Read Replicas, or a dedicated store for each kind of query.Fix slow queriesEnd a Slow query incident with Add index, clear the missing indexes that new Features ship, and stop N+1 queries from ORM frameworks.Survive a traffic spikeKeep serving when demand jumps several times for a short while, during the spike and with spare capacity, caches, and load shedding before the next one.Stop a retry stormEnd a Retry storm by cutting the retries that keep the Database overloaded, and set timeouts, backoff, and circuit breakers so the next slowdown stays small.

Guided paths

A reading order from lesson to idea to recipe.

Scale a system step by step

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Build a system one step at a time, from a single box to several regions, with every setting explained.

Start · One box

Browse by kind

Six kinds of page, each for a different need.

Play the game

Learn the controls

Tutorials

Learn by playing

How-to guides

Fix a problem

Explanation

Understand why

Patterns

Learn a design pattern

Reference

Look up a fact

Open source

The game, the Simulation, and this wiki share one repository.

elianiva/quorum

Read the code, report a bug, or send a fix.

Star on GitHubHow to contribute

GPL-3.0TypeScript source

Want the rules, formulas, and open questions behind the game? Read the Design document, or see what changed this week. Quorum is a game, and it simplifies real systems on purpose. Read what that means before you act on what you learn here. If the game helps you, support it on Ko-fi.