I've put a stand alone script here that reproduces the issue:

https://gist.github.com/3885509


On Friday, October 12, 2012 1:36:22 PM UTC-7, richard schneeman wrote:
>
>  Can you write a public rails app that reproduces this issue? This 
> behavior would be undesired and therefore a bug. If we can reproduce and 
> attach that to an issue it could help the discussion.  
>
> -- 
> Richard Schneeman
> http://heroku.com
> @schneems <http://twitter.com/schneems>
>
> On Friday, October 12, 2012 at 7:53 AM, Brian Durand wrote:
>
> I've been looking into consistency problem with association counter caches 
> where the counter cache value in the database is not consistent with the 
> actual number of records in the association. What I've found is that it is 
> from a concurrency issue where two process try to destroy the same record 
> at the same time. Here is the pseudo SQL that is sent to the database when 
> two process are deleting at the same time:
>
>   process_1 -> SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = 1
>   process_2 -> SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = 1
>   process_1 -> BEGIN
>   process_2 -> BEGIN
>   process_1 -> UPDATE parent_table SET counter_cache = 
> COALESCE(counter_cache, 0) - 1 WHERE id = 1
>   process_1 -> DELETE FROM table WHERE id = 1
>   process_1 -> COMMIT
>   process_2 -> UPDATE parent_table SET counter_cache = 
> COALESCE(counter_cache, 0) - 1 WHERE id = 1
>   process_2 -> DELETE FROM table WHERE id = 1
>   process_2 -> COMMIT
>
> What happens is process_1 updates the counter cache and deletes the 
> record. Process_2 simply updates the counter cache because the record is 
> already deleted by the time it tries to delete it.
>
> This is a pretty complicated issue and it touches more than just this one 
> test case. The problem being that all the before and after destroy 
> callbacks will be called regardless of if the record is actually destroyed. 
> In the particular case of the counter caches, I think it could be fixed by 
> moving the callback from a before_destroy to an after_destroy and adding a 
> check in ActiveRecord to only call after destroy callbacks if a row was 
> actually removed from the table.
>
> In general I think it would be correct to make this general behavior so 
> that after_destroy callbacks are not called if no record was deleted. 
> However, that could affect quite a few things inside application code which 
> could potentially leave objects in an inconsistent state because an 
> expected callback was not called. I think the pending upgrade to Rails 4.0 
> might be a good time to introduce such behavior since it's a major upgrade 
> and as such people should not be expecting applications to work 100% 
> without some alterations. This does not touch on the issue of 
> before_destroy callbacks which would not be able to check the status of the 
> delete operation. This could be handled with documentation stating that 
> this is a known issue.
>
> Another solution that would have less effect on current applications (but 
> also leave them more vulnerable to being in an inconsistent state) would be 
> to provide some sort of flag within the record that after_destroy callbacks 
> could check if they are persisting data or interacting with external 
> systems. Something like "row_deleted?" so that callbacks could be defined 
> as:
>
>   after_destroy :my_callback, :if => :row_deleted?
>
> Thoughts?
>
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