I’m implementing a Leaderboard into my django web app and don’t know the best way to do it. Currently, I’m just using SQL to order my users and, from that, make a Leaderboard, however, this creates two main problems:
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Performance is shocking. I’ve only tried scaling it to a few hundred users but I can tell calculating ranking is slow and excessive caching is annoying since I need users to see their ranking after they are added to the Leaderboard.
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It’s near-impossible to tell a user what position they are without performing the whole Leaderboard calculation again.
I haven’t deployed but I estimate about 5% updates to Leaderboard vs 95% reading (probably more, actually) the Leaderboard. So my latest idea is to calculate a Leaderboard again each time a user is added, with a position field I can easily sort by, and no need to re-calculate to display a user’s ranking.
However, could this be a problem if multiple users are committing at the same time, will locking be enough or will rankings stuff up? Additionally, I plan to put this on a separate database solely for these leaderboards, which is the best? I hear good things about redis…
Any better ways to solve this problem? (anyone know how SO makes their leaderboards?)
You will appreciate the concept of sorted sets in Redis.
Don’t miss the paragraph which describes your problem 😀