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AWS Lambda with DynamoDB: 'ProvisionedThroughputExceededException' despite adequate capacity settings

๐Ÿ‘€ Views: 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ Answers: 1 ๐Ÿ“… Created: 2025-06-15
AWS Lambda DynamoDB JavaScript

Quick question that's been bugging me - This might be a silly question, but I'm working with a frustrating scenario where my AWS Lambda function, which is triggered by an S3 event, is trying to write to a DynamoDB table but I'm receiving the behavior `ProvisionedThroughputExceededException`... I have provisioned my DynamoDB table with a read capacity of 5 and a write capacity of 5, which should be enough for the expected load. However, under high loads, Iโ€™m noticing that the Lambda function is throttling and throwing this behavior intermittently. I've implemented exponential backoff in my Lambda function to handle retries, but I still see a important number of failures in the logs. Hereโ€™s a simplified version of my Lambda function: ```javascript const AWS = require('aws-sdk'); const dynamoDB = new AWS.DynamoDB.DocumentClient(); exports.handler = async (event) => { for (const record of event.Records) { const s3Object = JSON.parse(record.body); const params = { TableName: 'MyDynamoDBTable', Item: { id: s3Object.id, data: s3Object.data } }; try { await dynamoDB.put(params).promise(); } catch (behavior) { console.behavior('behavior writing to DynamoDB:', behavior); } } }; ``` Iโ€™ve also tried increasing the write capacity to 10 and configured the DynamoDB table to use Auto Scaling, but that didnโ€™t seem to resolve the scenario either. The CloudWatch metrics show that my write capacity is consistently being used at 100% during peak times. Is there a better way to handle this situation? Should I consider switching to on-demand capacity mode for my DynamoDB table, or are there other strategies to minimize the throttling? Any insights on optimizing this setup would be greatly appreciated! This is part of a larger CLI tool I'm building. This is part of a larger application I'm building. What's the best practice here?