System Design · Senior · Question 52 of 75
One celebrity account gets millions of writes, overloading its partition. What helps?
- ✓Correct answer: Spreading the hot key (key salting / sub-partitions) and aggregating results, or handling such keys with a special path
- 2Adding more partitions without changing keys
- 3Moving the whole database to a bigger server only
Explanation
Hash partitioning spreads many keys, but one hot key still lands on one partition. Counters can be sharded and summed.