Your Redis Leaderboard Is Probably Breaking Ties Wrong

A leaderboard looks like a one-command problem: ZADD weekly 100 alice ZADD weekly 100 bob ZREVRANGE weekly 0 -1 WITHSCORES While building Podium , an open-source Redis-backed leaderboard service, we discovered that the difficult part begins when two players have the same score. We are sharing the design because this edge case can silently turn player IDs into ranking rules. TeneficGames / podium High-performance, Redis-backed leaderboards for games and competitive applications. Podium High-performance, Redis-backed leaderboards for games and competitive applications. Podium provides ready-to-run HTTP and gRPC APIs for scores, ranks, seasons, and player-relative views. It is designed for backend teams operating large fleets of independent leaderboards without provisioning each leaderboard in advance. Fair, deterministic ordering when scores are equal. Single and bulk score updates, including multi-leaderboard fan-out. Standalone Redis and real Redis Cluster integration coverage. Deploy one multi-architecture OCI image with Docker, containerd, Kubernetes or another OCI-compatible runtime. Quickstart · Performance · API · Documentation · Helm chart · Docker Hub · GHCR Quickstart Start Redis 8.2 and the latest stable Podium image: docker network create podium docker run --detach --name podium-redis --network podium redis:8.2-alpine docker run --detach --rm --name podium \ --network podium \ --publish 8880:8880 \ --publish 8881:8881 \ --env PODIUM_REDIS_HOST=podium-redis \ --env PODIUM_REDIS_PORT=6379 \ trungdlp/podium:latest start Verify the service: curl http://localhost:8880/healthcheck WORKING Submit two equal scores: curl --request … View on GitHub Both players have 100 points. Alice arrived first, so most game designers would expect: 1. alice: 100 2. bob: 100 But that is not what the data model says. Redis sorted sets order members with equal scores lexicographically. With a reverse range, that secondary ordering is reversed too. Your "fair" tie may therefore be de