Question

A gaming application computes a global leaderboard by running an expensive aggregation query against an Amazon RDS database. The query runs on every page load, and during peak hours the database CPU is saturated, causing slow response times for all users. The leaderboard only needs to be accurate to within about 60 seconds. A developer wants to reduce database load with minimal code changes. What is the most effective approach?

Accepted Answer

Cache the computed leaderboard result in Amazon ElastiCache with a 60-second TTL, and serve subsequent reads from the cache until it expires.

Answer

Add a read replica to the RDS instance and direct all leaderboard queries to the replica.

Answer

Enable DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) in front of the RDS database to cache the query results.

Answer

Increase the RDS instance size to a larger instance class to handle the peak query volume.