I am working on a small web application for a friend and am thinking about using a plain text file instead of MySQL, it just seems like a bit too much for the simplicity of this application.
The application will basically let people put their name on a list from a web form. There will likely be about 30-100 people putting their names on the list at a time, maybe sometimes upward of 200-300. Once all the names are entered the submission form will be closed and a single user will view the list and probably erase it soon afterwards.
What I am curious about is if there could be any issues with a lot of people trying to put their names on the list at the same time. If somebody submits a name while the server is in the middle of writing to the file, will this cause the second person’s submission to fail since the file is in use already, or will the server wait for one submission to be finished before starting another?
No, it will not wait, google for “race condition”. If there is not much traffic on the submission form, that will not hurt, but I would recommend to use a mysql anyway, because the effort is quite the same.