Hi everyone, Some quick background before I get to my question:
I have developed a fantasy football game that is based on an auction style format. In any given game there are a consistant number of players, usually 10 or 12. There can be more than one game taking place at the same time on the site. All 12 players are trying to put together the best team they can with a limited amount of fictional money, in this case $200. A typical auction lasts around 90 minutes, and consists of a whole lot of furious refreshing of the auction board by the participants since each player only has a 2 minute clock. It might be easiest to demonstrate what this looks like by copying some data from an actual "auction board": *****at the top there is a refresh button**** $1 Bid On: L Tomlinson, RB SDC High Bid: You! Timer: 0m 25s $2 Bid On: P Holmes, RB KCC High Bid: You! Timer: 0m 35s $2 Bid On: C Portis, RB WAS High Bid: You! Timer: 0m 38s $2 Bid On: A Green, RB GBP High Bid: You! Timer: 0m 42s $2 Bid On: D McAllister, RB NOS High Bid: You! Timer: 0m 45s . . . When the player at the top goes to Timer: 0m 0s whoever has the high bid is awarded that player. Then a player is pulled off of a list that the auctioner who "nominated" that player created, and that player has a full clock and goes to the bottom of the list. The question: Since there is so much clicking going on, and my php code and mysql calls (including the transactions that decide which new player should be nominated to the board) obviously happen with each user click, is there any way to hide the guts of the work so that when they click refresh all they are doing is viewing the state of the respective tables at that time. In other words, I don't need 4 people simultaneously calling the functions that decide which player should be nominated next, awarded the player that was won to the necessary roster, deducting money, etc. With four people calling the function at once, I am forced to lock up the rows and rollback 3 of the transactions. Is there any way to have them all call the same function that only gets executed once? Another related question would be, would it make sense to create a cronjob that would go through the behind the scenes functions every one or two seconds, thereby spreading the load and sparing the end user from being involved in activating the use of the functions? Or is the natural "burstable" patterns that human users create actually easier on the server and a more natural way of doing things. I know I've thrown alot of stuff out there for you guys, but I'm just wondering if there is a better way from how I am doing things at present. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Jeremy -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]