What causes the primary database overloaded by read traffic?

All queries hit the primary, so read-heavy traffic competes with writes and overloads the single primary.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Set Up Database Read/Write Splitting

Quick answer: Route reads to replicas and writes to the primary, accounting for replication lag, so the primary handles writes while reads scale across replicas.

Sending all reads to the primary wastes its write capacity. Read/write splitting scales reads separately. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Route reads to replicas

Send read queries to replicas so the primary is freed for writes.

2. Send writes to the primary

Keep all writes on the primary to maintain consistency.

3. Handle replication lag

Read from the primary where you need read-your-writes consistency.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every backend error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Most of the time the fix is small. Seeing the failure clearly is the part that actually costs you.