Hot key.
also: hot keys · hotkey · hot partition · hot partitions · hot spot · hotspotA key that gets disproportionately more traffic than the rest, overwhelming the one partition or cache node that owns it.
the two-minute refresher
- All requests for one key land on one partition, which saturates while others idle.
- Rough thresholds: >1000× the average key, or >10% of a partition's capacity.
- Causes: viral content, celebrities, flash sales, a popular product.
- Fixes: caching, read replicas, key splitting (salting), local caches, request coalescing.