Redis Sorted Sets – Real Time Leaderboard Design

Author

Govardhana M K
May 03, 2025

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🧠 Use Case

  • Redis Sorted Sets – Real Time Leaderboard Design

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🧠 USE CASE

Redis Sorted Sets – Real Time Leaderboard Design

Recently I implemented a Redis backed real time leaderboard for a gaming startup in Portugal.

The goal was clear. Show live rankings as players compete, update scores instantly, and keep latency low even with thousands of users. Here's how I built it.

  • Users connect via an Application Load Balancer.

  • The backend is deployed in an Auto Scaling Group across three Availability Zones.

  • These instances write scores to an ElastiCache Redis cluster.

  • Redis then powers the leaderboard, which is directly consumed by the frontend in real time.

Everything runs inside a VPC with public access locked down, and the leaderboard is exposed only through backend APIs with rate limiting.

Why Redis Sorted Sets

Redis Sorted Sets allow storing a member with an associated score, and Redis keeps them sorted automatically. This makes it ideal for ranking systems like leaderboards.

To add a player score:

ZADD leaderboard 40 "Dave"
ZADD leaderboard 30 "John"
ZADD leaderboard 20 "Raj"
ZADD leaderboard 10 "Bob"

To get the top 3 players:

ZREVRANGE leaderboard 0 2 WITHSCORES

The best part is that insertions and reads both stay at O(log N), even as player count grows.

  • ZADD adds a member with a score or updates it if it exists.

  • ZRANGE returns members within a score range in ascending order.

  • ZRANK gives the rank of a member in ascending order.

  • ZREVRANK gives the rank in descending order.

Operational Considerations

  1. TTLs were used on keys to auto expire daily and weekly leaderboards.

  2. Redis keyspace notifications helped detect score update spikes and anomalies.

  3. A custom Prometheus exporter was added to track leaderboard response times and update rates.

  4. After crossing 100,000 users, we moved to Redis Cluster and used hash tagging to shard by game mode.

If you're building something where users compete on scores, Redis Sorted Sets are the simplest and most efficient way to implement a leaderboard. You get ranking, ordering, and updates in near real time without complex code.

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