----- Original Message ----- From: Jimmie Houchin <jhouchin@texoma.net>
Will an app as described above still suffer from problems with high writes?
Possibly, but only if there are hidden hotspots. For example, in your message-appending scenario, are these messages being added to the same Folder? If so, the Folder is getting written with each object added to it, and will be a source of conflict. If the objects that your users are editing are cataloged, the Catalog is a hotspot. There are two independent attacks on this problem underway: 1. Make Folders and Catalogs store meta-data about their contents in a data structure consisting of small persistent objects, like B-Tree nodes. This reduces the scope of potential conflict (and the size of the update required by a write) to the size of one of these nodes. 2. Implement the application-level conflict handling you read about, so that Folders and Catalogs can decide that two writes don't conflict after all, and merge them into a single update. Cheers, Evan @ digicool & 4-am