Gaming Leaderboard

Interview-Ready Approach

1) Clarify Scope and SLOs

• •Problem statement: Design a real-time gaming leaderboard showing top players, rank lookups, and score history.
• •Design for a peak load target around 116 RPS (including burst headroom).
• •Games supported: ~500
• •Total players: ~200,000
• •Score submissions/day: ~2,000,000
• •Leaderboard query latency: < 50 ms
• •Rank lookup latency: < 50 ms

2) Capacity Planning Method

• •Convert traffic and growth constraints into request rate, storage growth, and concurrency budgets.
• •Keep at least 2-3x safety margin per tier (ingress, compute, storage, async workers).
• •Reserve explicit latency budgets per hop so p95 can be defended in review.

3) Architecture Decisions

• •Databases: Define a clear system-of-record and design read/write paths separately before adding optimizations.
• •Caching: Put cache on hot read paths first and pick cache-aside or write-through explicitly.
• •API Design: Standardize API boundaries, idempotency keys, pagination, and error contracts first.

4) Reliability and Failure Strategy

• •Use strong write constraints (transactions or conditional writes) and explicit backup/restore strategy.
• •Bound staleness with TTL + invalidation hooks for critical entities.
• •Apply strict input validation and backward-compatible versioning.

5) Validation Plan

• •Run one peak-load test, one dependency-degradation test, and one failover test.
• •Verify idempotency for all retried writes and async consumers.
• •Track user-facing SLOs first: p95 latency, error rate, and successful throughput.

6) Trade-offs to Call Out in Interviews

• •Databases: SQL gives stronger transactional guarantees; NoSQL often gives better write scaling and flexibility.
• •Caching: Higher hit rate cuts latency/cost, but stale data and invalidation bugs become primary risks.
• •API Design: Rich APIs improve developer speed but can create long-term compatibility burden.

Practical Notes

• •Redis Sorted Sets are purpose-built for leaderboards - ZADD to submit scores, ZRANGE for top-N, ZRANK for player rank, all in O(log N).
• •Separate sorted sets for daily/weekly/all-time. Use a cron job to archive and reset daily/weekly sets.
• •Friends leaderboard: fetch friend scores from the all-time set (ZSCORE for each friend) and sort client-side.

Why This Solution Works

Request path: The solution keeps ingress, service logic, and stateful dependencies separated so each layer can scale independently.

Reference flow: Web Clients -> API Gateway -> API Service -> Primary SQL DB -> Redis Cache

Design strengths

• •Cache sits on the read path to absorb repeated queries and keep DB pressure stable.

Interview defense

• •This design makes bottlenecks explicit (ingress, core compute, persistence, async workers).
• •It supports progressive scaling without re-architecting the core request path.
• •It keeps correctness-sensitive state changes in durable systems while offloading background work asynchronously.