Cgi Counter

[Dominic Mitchell]

Paul Rubin <phr-n2001d at nightsong.com> writes:
> Nomad <nomad***@***freemail.absa.co.za> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, 12 Oct 2001 12:59:04 -0700 (PDT), Neal Irwin
> > ...> 
> > fileWrite = open('count.txt', 'w')
> > fileWrite.write(str(intHits))
> > fileWrite.close
> > ...
> > Pretty simple, but it works...
> 
> Um, what happens if two requests (coming from different processes in
> the web server) run the hit counter at the same time?  You need some
> kind of interlocking for this to be reliable.

Alternatively, if you don't mind losing the occaisional hit, you could
just write to a temp file and rename into place.  Renaming is an
atomic operation (under Unix, anwyay, dunno about win32), so you won't
get corruption, just a few lost hits.

-Dom

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