[BangPypers] Deploying with mod_wsgi and file locking

[Anand Chitipothu]

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 10:46 PM, Noufal Ibrahim <noufal at nibrahim.net.in>wrote:

> Amit Sethi <amit.pureenergy at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Hi All , I am writing a pyramid app and deploying it mod_wsgi . The
> > file regularly writes into a file in the file system . This process of
> > writing xml is in a middleware . Now the question is do I need to
> > apply a file locking mechanism to make sure that multiple requests do
> > not try to write to the same file . If yes what is the best way to
> > implement a file locking mechanism in python.
>
> This is going to get problematic. My first thought is to offload the
> writing to a separate process which maintains a queue of such requests
> and only that will write to the file. You won't have any issues
> then. This might be impractical if the file needs to be updated in real
> time in which case, a file is not the right way to go. You should use a
> database table or something and then run some periodic process that
> updates the file.
>
> If both of these don't work, then
> http://docs.python.org/2/library/fcntl.html#fcntl.lockf exists to lock
> files but I think it will really mess up the performance of your app.
>

Why not just write to database with a timestamp and run a cron job to
periodically move the recent entries from database to file that want?

That reduces the number of moving parts drastically and easy to manage.

Anand