On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 09:34:49AM -0400, Nikolas Everett wrote:
I worked on an accounting system with similar requirements and we had an even more complicated system but one you might want to consider:
- When something happens record the event and how much it changed
the value along with a timestamp. In our case we'd just have enable and disable events. 2. We ran a job that summarized those events into hourly changes. 3. Every day we a log of the actual value (at midnight or whatever).
This let us quickly make all kinds of crazy graphs with super deep granularity over short periods of time and less granularity over long periods of time. Essentially it was an accountant's version of RRDtool. It didn't have problems with getting out of sync because we never had more than one process update more than one field.
It is probably overkill but might serve as a dramatic foil to the simpler ideas.
Thanks a lot, Nik - I'm sure it is overkill, but it sounds like one of the more seamless solutions without being too heavy on performance. Probably our solution will look like "fire events to update the counts, then sync them periodically when some number of events have fired *or* when some amount of time has passed without a sync."
I'll set about working on that now; should be a fun day, since I've never worked with our job queue before :)
In other news, the BetaFeatures framework, as well as the start of our MultimediaViewer, is up at http://multimedia-alpha.wmflabs.org - go ahead and experiment!