Back-end technology choice to handle multiple simultaneous operations

manpreet Best Answer 3 years ago

I'm working on a project that is pretty demanding server-side and I don't know what technology I should use for the database, the server and the hardware.

Here are the criteria :

• the server will receive, once a day and almost simultaneously, number_of_users times answers to a question. Imagine a service where a question is asked to every user at the exact same time and they only have a window of 30 sec to answer.

• it will have to treat them all and sort them from best to worst. Imagine that we can easily calculate a distance from the correct answer that will be the sorting criteria. The goal is to publish the ranking within 20-30 seconds.

• the number of users could be 1000, 10000 or even more !

First, does it sound doable or really really hard to implement ? By really really hard, I mean that a bunch of experienced engineers are required.

If it's doable, what is the most appropriate solutions I should consider to implement such a service ? NoSQL or SQL ? What server should I use ?

Thanks a bunch for your help and let me know if you need more details !