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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T20:02:12+00:00

I have an app where users get points for actions they perform – either

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I have an app where users get points for actions they perform – either 1 point for an easy action or 2 for a difficult one.
I wish to display to the user the total number of points he got in my app and the points obtained this week (since Monday at midnight).

I have a table that records all actions, along with their time and number of points.

I have two alternatives and I’m not sure which is better:

  1. Every time the user sees the report perform a query and sum the points the user got
  2. Add two fields to each user that records the number of points obtained so far (total and weekly). The weekly points value will be set to 0 every Monday at midnight.

The first option is easier, but I’m afraid that as I’ll get many users and actions queries will take a long time.

The second option bares the risk of inconsistency between the table of actions and the summary values.

I’m very interested in what you think is the best alternative here.

Thanks,
Dorian

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Take option one. Scale later

    My thought is to take the simpler approach of querying the table each time and when you have the problem of so many users on your site that it’s slowing down your server, you can switch at that time. If you have so many users that your server is slowing down then probably you’ll need to scale other parts of your application too, but don’t go out of your way terribly at these early stages to scale your application. Scale when you need to scale.

    My point of view is taken from the 37signals book “Getting Real”, chapter 4 – Scale Later
    http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Scale_Later.php

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