title: aws dynamo db throughput
body: <p>There's something which I cant understand about AWS DynamoDb throughput.</p>
  
  <p>Lets consider strongly consistent reads.</p>
  
  <p>Now, I understand that in this case, 1 unit of capacity would mean I can read up to 4KB of per second.</p>
  
  <p>It's the "per second" bit that slightly confuses me. If you know exactly how quickly you want to read data then you can set the units appropriately. But what if you're not too fussy about the read time?</p>
  
  <p>Say I do have only 1 read unit assigned to my table and I try to read an item which is more than 4KB. Now surely that just means that my read is going to take more than 1 second? That would be fine but the documentation talks about Requests failing. How can AWS determine that I used too many units when I didn't request that the data be read within a particular time?</p>
  
  <p>Maybe I am missing something obvious. Can you someone help clear this up?</p>