Read Paul's message in the Zope list. He pointed out that because the ZODB uses a logfile structure (i.e. an append based mechanism where changes are appended rather than overwritten) something such as a counter which changes with each access will write to the database (appending, not overwriting) with every access. On a site with enough traffic to really warrant a counter, this could cause the database to grow significantly in a short amount of time. Can you imagine the amount of writing if the server got Slashdotted? Since my code uses Longs, which are (I assume) stored as strings (since no binary format exists to handle arbitrary lengths) wherefore a base count of 4000 hit by a Slashdot effect resulting in a 1000 hits results in a minium addition to the database of 4K. I am not sure that this is a significant amount, but Paul seems to think it would be better if the hits were accumulated before being written. This requires some place to temporarily store data... persistently as far as memory is concerned, but not persistent with regard to disk storage. The only way I can think to do this at the moment is to create a persistent Product, and force some of its attributes to fail to be seen by the persistence mechanism. At this point, my primary question is how do I, within my own __setstate__, call the original __setstate__? My guess is Persistent.__setstate__ and pass self in manually, but I would welcome advice. Thanks again. Howard C. Shaw III Programmer/SysAdmin St. Thomas High School

---------- From: Mike Pelletier[SMTP:mike@compar.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 1999 3:48 PM To: Shaw, Howard Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] New Counter Product

I don't understand... Why does the underlying persitance mechanism matter at all? And why do you want to not pickle certain instance attributes? If I knew that, it would be much clearer to me.

Mike.

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