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A Leaderboard That Melts One Partition
A gaming platform stores per-player scores in DynamoDB with
PK = "LEADERBOARD", SK = score#player_id to support "top 100 players
globally". During a viral event, writes to this table throttle badly
even though overall traffic is well within the provisioned capacity.
- Explain why this design throttles under load that should be within capacity.
- Propose a redesign that keeps a global top-100 query cheap without a single hot partition.
- Generalize: what is the underlying rule this design violated?
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