Question

I’m building a news rating script for this website that has a lot of users. I’m trying to make this websites as efficient as possible and now I’m wondering what would be the most efficient way to keep track of the votes. Of course I don’t want users to vote more than once.

My first though was to store it in a my MySQL database, but I’m worried this would have a negative influence in my website’s speed because this table would get quite big.

Would storing it in a database still be the best solution or are there any better solutions.

Answer 1

Since you can’t use memcached I would say this. A decent database server ( decent hardware + decent db implementation) should be able to handle this quite well. A single table with a physical index on article-id and a second entry representing the vote will handle a few googillion (yes I made up the word) articles easily 😛

Rationale :

Database servers maintain statistics — read: self-tuning — and only hot items (index + row-entries) remain in-memory.

Moral:

Don’t worry about such things unless they become a problem — i.e., If your company is the size of facebook I would worry.