A gaming company inherited a high-scale event processing engine (Veltrix) that routed player actions with promised low latency and high uptime. During traffic spikes, the system dropped events and experienced high latency and replication lag. After failed tuning attempts, they redesigned the architecture to use a two-tier system with Redis Streams for low-latency event fanout and CockroachDB with follower reads for regional event storage. They implemented idempotency keys to prevent duplicate processing. This resulted in a significant latency reduction (p95 latency dropped from 650ms to 42ms), lower duplicate event rates, and improved reliability during outages, at a moderate infrastructure cost increase.

May 27, 2026, 1:30 AM