I wanted to use setGlobalState() for a simple pageview counter, but I am a little worried about the saving mechanism of the CStatePersister which, as far as I know, is used by default for saving global state. All the code does is:
As far as I can tell, in the unlikely event of two PHP processes trying to save the state at roughly the same time, one of them will throw an error. Am I right? Is using the setGlobalState and getGlobalState safe?
The other request will wait until the lock is released.
However there is a different problem: When you set/get a state, Yii will first internally cache the states until the end of the request and then write them to the file. That means on concurrent requests this may happen:
Request #1 increases counter
Request #2 increases counter
Request #1 saves states
Request #2 now overwrites the states of Request #1
In the docs it says:
While this may be true for some global counter, "A global value" in this context is more like a config variable that changes rarely. You can see an example here.
So better use something else (database?) for such things as a pageview counter.
As for the other issue I am aware of that problem, and I am torn between leaving it as is, since the counter is nothing of real importance, or moving it to DB. I guess I will do the latter.
