Examkin

Question

Difficulty: EasyPerformance and Scalability Optimization

A gaming company hosts a multiplayer game that uses an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance to store player profiles. During peak hours, the game servers perform a high volume of read-only queries to retrieve player stats, causing the DB instance's CPU utilization to reach 100% and impacting gameplay. A solutions architect must scale the database to resolve the CPU bottleneck. Which database configuration should the solutions architect implement?

  1. A
    Deploy Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached with multi-AZ replication enabled and route read queries through the cache.
  2. B
    Enable RDS Multi-AZ deployment and configure the game servers to route read-only queries to the secondary standby DB instance.
  3. Create Amazon RDS Read Replicas and update the game server configuration to direct read-only queries to the replica endpoints.Answer
  4. D
    Configure the database's Auto Scaling group with a very short cooldown period to launch new database instances immediately during peak traffic.

Answer

Create Amazon RDS Read Replicas and update the game server configuration to direct read-only queries to the replica endpoints.
Creating Amazon RDS Read Replicas is the correct solution because it scales database read capacity horizontally. By routing read-only queries to the replica endpoints, the game servers offload query processing from the primary DB instance, reducing its CPU usage. The replication is asynchronous, which is suitable for player profile reads that can tolerate slight replication lag.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the performance bottleneck on the primary database instance.
High CPU utilization is driven by a surge in read-only queries during peak hours.
Understanding the nature of the database workload (read-heavy vs. write-heavy) determines the correct scaling approach.
2
Select the appropriate scaling mechanism for read-heavy RDS databases.
RDS Read Replicas are selected to handle horizontal read scaling.
RDS Read Replicas offload read traffic from the primary database instance, reducing its CPU utilization.
3
Update the application configuration to utilize the replica endpoints.
Game servers send read queries to Read Replicas and write queries to the primary database.
Replicas operate on separate endpoints, requiring application-level routing to distribute the load.

Key Concept

Read scaling in Amazon RDS using Read Replicas versus passive high-availability standbys in Multi-AZ deployments.
Rate this question

Topics

Performance and Scalability Optimization

More questions from this topic