As an afterthought someone decided at the last minute, that maybe the architect (me) should be on the architectural review of a product.

Normally for social networking web development, I allow for a little short term inconsistency. This is because only one user has access to modify a thing and that user isn’t likely to do two things at the same time. Because of this, concurrency is almost never a problem and. even if the data gets clobbered, the database at least is consistent and your objects are quickly fixed.

The problem with this particular project is that since a paid good is involved and many users will race to the same data store—inconsistencies can occur and they’d be more harmful than a goto statement. The solution proposed was to build a Java service to keep these eight pieces of data consistent. There was also a release plan in order to estimate the resource allocation for the new service under live site load.

Though late to the meeting, I opened my mouth and said, “You don’t need a Java service to do this. You can do it all in PHP and memcache.”

How do prevent clobbering in memcache using PHP after the jump