In AWS documentation, it stated that
"For provisioned mode tables, you specify throughput capacity in terms of read capacity units (RCUs) and write capacity units (WCUs):
One read capacity unit represents **one strongly consistent read per second**, or two eventually consistent reads per second, for an item up to 4 KB in size."
But what count as one read? If I loop through different partitions to read from dynamodb, will each loop count as one read? Thank you.
For a GetItem and BatchGetItem operation which read an individual item, the size of the entire item is used to calculate the amount of RCU (read capacity units) used, even if you only ask to read specific parts from this item. As you quoted, this size is than rounded up to a multiple of 4K: If the item is 3.9K you'll pay one RCU for a strongly-consistent read (ConsistentRead=true), and two RCUs for a 4.1K item. Again, as you quoted, if you asked for an eventual-consistent read (ConsistentRead=false) the number of RCUs would be halved.
For transactions (TransactGetItems) the number of RCUs is double what it would have been with consistent reads.
For scans - Scan or Query - the cost is calculated the same as reading a single item, except for one piece of good news: The rounding up happens for the entire size read, not for each individual item. This is very important for small items - for example consider that you have items of 100 bytes each. Reading each one individually costs you one RCU even though it's only 100 bytes, not 4K. But if you Query a partition that has 40 of these items, the total size of these 40 items is 4000 bytes so you pay just one RCU to read all 40 items - not 40 RCUs. If the length of the entire partion is 4 MB, you'll pay 1024 RCUs when ConsistentRead=true, or 512 RCUs when ConsistentRead=false, to read the entire partition - regardless of how many items this partition contains.