Fix DynamoDB throttling without unlimited retries

A workload receives throttling errors during traffic spikes. Adding more parallel workers increases the pressure and can make recovery slower.

Why this happens

Request rate, partition access patterns, configured capacity and service limits can affect throttling. A hot key can remain a problem even when aggregate traffic appears reasonable.

Step-by-step solution

1. Inspect the throttling reason and relevant table or index metrics. Determine whether the pressure is concentrated on a key pattern or spread across the workload.

2. Use the SDK’s supported bounded retry behaviour with backoff and jitter. For batch operations, handle unprocessed items without resending successful items unnecessarily.

3. Review capacity settings and access-pattern design based on the observed cause. Avoid assuming that a capacity increase alone resolves a highly concentrated workload.

Worked example

A batch write can return some unprocessed items rather than fail every item. Retry the unprocessed subset according to the SDK guidance and keep a limit on outstanding work.

Verify the fix

Load-test the representative key distribution and confirm successful throughput, latency and retry counts. A test with uniformly random keys may miss the production hot-key problem.

Prevent a repeat

Monitor throttling by resource and design partition keys around real access patterns. Keep application writes idempotent where retries may repeat an operation.

Reference

Official documentation or standards guidance

An original Gistmax troubleshooting guide. Scenarios and sample values are illustrative; configuration depends on your software version and environment. Cover diagram: Gistmax Tutorials.