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⚡️ Designing Sui Apps for Scale: Maximize Throughput & Avoid Contention
❓ Problem: Many devs unknowingly bottle-neck their Sui apps by cramming multiple users’ state into one big “global” object. The result? 🚧 Poor throughput and painful contention.
💡 Why this happens: Sui is built for parallel execution — but only if your design allows it. Touching a single shared object kills concurrency.
🎯 Goal: Here’s a scaling playbook with rules, examples, and a checklist to help you unlock Sui’s true power.
🧩 1) Split Hot State into Many Small Objects
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Create per-user / per-item objects instead of global registries.
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Example:
- ❌ Bad: A single game object holding all players’ inventories.
- ✅ Good: Each player has their own inventory object.
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🚀 Benefit: Sui can execute transactions in parallel with no contention. 📚 docs.sui.io
🚫 2) Avoid Global Counters or Shared Objects
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Global counters = 🚦traffic jams.
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Alternatives:
- Off-chain counters with periodic on-chain checkpoints.
- Sharded counters → e.g., 1 per region or partition, aggregated later.
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Result: Higher throughput, fewer conflicts.
📡 3) Use Events & Indexers for Aggregation
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Don’t burn gas doing heavy on-chain aggregation.
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Instead:
- Emit events 📢.
- Use an off-chain indexer to compile data for the UI.
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🔑 Pattern: On-chain = state changes only. Off-chain = fast queries.
🧪 4) Concurrency Testing
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Stress test locally with parallel transactions hitting disjoint objects.
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Watch out for:
- Object version conflicts 🔄.
- Bottlenecked objects 📉.
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Fix by redesigning objects until throughput looks healthy. 📚 Sui GitHub
✅ Quick Scaling Checklist
- Break global state → per-user/per-item objects.
- Replace global counters with off-chain or sharded solutions.
- Use events + indexers for fast aggregation.
- Run concurrency tests to validate design.
⚡ Bottom line: Sui rewards parallelism-first design. Think many small objects → not one big one. If you respect the scheduler, your app can scale to thousands of TPS without breaking a sweat 💪.
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