> What would be the best way in rails to store a single variable and have > it persist. Like a have a variable that says "total_visits" that counts > the total number of page loads. > > The only solution I can think of is having a table with a single row.
One answer would be yes, pretty much if you really want to store a single data point that's accessible to a number of instances of Rails, then either a file or a database is what you'll need to use (assuming you don't trust anything RAM based). However, your specific scenario could quickly become an extreme bottleneck. It would be better served by logging (preferably asynchronously), and then read & tally the log to create your total. Do it periodically, so you're not starting from the first log every every time. There's probably other ways, but using a single var for something like page loads is looking for trouble as your app scales. If you know the page requests will be low enough to not be a bottleneck then using the DB with row or table locking (effectively the same for this case) might be OK. Another option if you can tolerate the potential for a little inaccuracy is to go ahead and use RAM (with a mutex) to keep the count, and periodically write that value to disk to minimize the disk access. If you have load balanced app servers you'll need a central RAM cache like memcache. That's what comes to my mind -- others may have better ideas. -- gw -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
