I am working on an app, and need to keep track of how any views a page has. Almost like how SO does it. It is a value used to determine how popular a given page is.
I am concerned that writing to the DB every time a new view needs to be recorded will impact performance. I know this borderline pre-optimization, but I have experienced the problem before. Anyway, the value doesn't need to be real time; it is OK if it is delayed by 10 minutes or so. I was thinking that caching the data, and doing one large write every X minutes should help.
I am running on Windows Azure, so the Appfabric cache is available to me. My original plan was to create some sort of compound key (PostID:UserID), and tag the key with "pageview". Appfabric allows you to get all keys by tag. Thus I could let them build up, and do one bulk insert into my table instead of many small writes. The table looks like this, but is open to change.
int PageID | guid userID | DateTime ViewTimeStamp
The website would still get the value from the database, writes would just be delayed, make sense?
I just read that the Windows Azure Appfabric cache does not support tag based searches, so it pretty much negates my idea.
My question is, how would you accomplish this? I am new to Azure, so I am not sure what my options are. Is there a way to use the cache without tag based searches? I am just looking for advice on how to delay these writes to SQL.
You might want to take a look at http://www.apathybutton.com (and the Cloud Cover episode it links to), which talks about a highly scalable way to count things. (It might be overkill for your needs, but hopefully it gives you some options.)