Problem: Logger Rate Limiter

Posted by Marcy on February 18, 2015

Question

Design a logger system that receive stream of messages along with its timestamps, each message should be printed if and only if it is not printed in the last 10 seconds.

Given a message and a timestamp (in seconds granularity), return true if the message should be printed in the given timestamp, otherwise returns false.

It is possible that several messages arrive roughly at the same time.

Example:

Logger logger = new Logger();

// logging string "foo" at timestamp 1
logger.shouldPrintMessage(1, "foo"); returns true; 

// logging string "bar" at timestamp 2
logger.shouldPrintMessage(2,"bar"); returns true;

// logging string "foo" at timestamp 3
logger.shouldPrintMessage(3,"foo"); returns false;

// logging string "bar" at timestamp 8
logger.shouldPrintMessage(8,"bar"); returns false;

// logging string "foo" at timestamp 10
logger.shouldPrintMessage(10,"foo"); returns false;

// logging string "foo" at timestamp 11
logger.shouldPrintMessage(11,"foo"); returns true;

Code

import java.util.concurrent.*;

class Logger {
    ConcurrentHashMap<String, Integer> lastTimestamps;

    /** Initialize your data structure here. */
    public Logger() {
        lastTimestamps = new ConcurrentHashMap<>();
    }

    /** Returns true if the message should be printed in the given timestamp, otherwise returns false.
        If this method returns false, the message will not be printed.
        The timestamp is in seconds granularity. */
    public boolean shouldPrintMessage(int timestamp, String message) {
        Integer last = lastTimestamps.putIfAbsent(message, timestamp);
        if(last == null) return true;
        if(timestamp - last < 10) return false;
        lastTimestamps.replace(message, last, timestamp);

        return true;
    }
}

/**
 * Your Logger object will be instantiated and called as such:
 * Logger obj = new Logger();
 * boolean param_1 = obj.shouldPrintMessage(timestamp,message);
 */