Let me preface this with I'm not by any means a DB expert and I don't know how CF works. But I do have a decent amount of experience making stuff on the internet.

From a theoretical point of view, this is quite an interesting question. In practice (abusing properties of the real world), I would guess the naive check every time the page is refreshed is fine. For instance, I probably have more friends than ~90% of CF users (and I only have 154). In the last div2, only 16 of my friends either competed during the contest or have yet VP'd it.

So I would imagine the performance would be pretty much fine if you just did a DB query generally like:

• get my list of friends
• left join the relevant contest info to determine who is registered/has submitted
• take rows WHERE that person is actually competing
• take the correct page of the 20 of those that we are interested in, sorted by current place
• left join all 'expensive' data that needs to be shown to the user

Since almost everyone on CF has a very small number of friends competing in any given contest live, this probably isn't more than an order of magnitude harder than just displaying any particular individual's score.

this might be helpful .