What to choose to store just one integer? Sqlite? or Text file?

Question

I've build a small web-service in PHP. I want to control the number of calls to a specific API method.

I thought at first of using a text file, because it's just an integer. But after taking a good look at SQLite it seemed much more convenient. So the code is just: get the "counter" from SQLite and increment it when that method is called, then store it back on SQLite db.

Is this a right way of doing it? Would it be simpler and more scalable to just use a file or... maybe something else?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

a third possibility: memcachedb. it's compatible with memcached, but stores it's key-value store to a BDB file. it not only has read-write commands, but also atomic increment/decrement for numeric values.

one more alternative would be to write a 'counter server'. an independent process that gets 'read' and 'increment' commands over a socket. the advantage is that it's really easy to do 'atomic' increments. it stores it's counter(s) on a simple file, without concurrency problems since there's never more than one server.

it should be easy to write in less than a hundred lines of C. just a tight loop processing one command at a time, flushing to disk every few seconds. since the processing is so simple, the latency is minimal.

Answer 2

A database would typically scale better than the filesystem, but you are going to need to be careful and use appropriate locks with either mechanism.