Simultaneous identical requests = double in database - postgresql

My controller handles a POST request, inserting a object in PostgreSQL. It works like this :
Check if the object does not exist in DB
Save the object in DB
But sometimes, 2 identical requests come too close and I guess the second one does not find the object of the first one so both are written in DB.
I am on heroku and I must take scalability into account also : the two requests can come on different dynos ( static variable wont work )
I did not find anything about database locking in Play
Any idea ?

Related

Meteor - using snychronised non-persistent / in-memory MongoDB on the server

in a Meteor app, having real-time reactive updates between all connected clients is achieved with writing in collections, publishing and subscribing the right data. In normal case this means also database writes.
But what if I would like to sync particular data which does not need to be persistent and I would like to save the overhead of writing in the database ? Is it possible to use mini-mongo or other in-memory caching on the server by still preserving DDP synchronisation to all clients ?
Example
In my app I have a multiple collapsed threads and I want to show, which users currently expanded particular thread
Viewed by: Mike, Johny, Steven ...
I can store the information in the threads collection or make make a separate viewers collection and publish the information to the clients. But there is actually no meaning in making this information persistent an having the overhead of database writes.
I am confused by the collections documentation. which states:
OPTIONS
connection Object
The server connection that will manage this collection. Uses the default connection if not specified. Pass the return value of calling DDP.connect to specify a different server. Pass null to specify no connection.
and
... when you pass a name, here’s what happens:
...
On the client (and on the server if you specify a connection), a Minimongo instance is created.
But If I create a new collection and pass the option object with conneciton: null
// Creates a new Mongo collections and exports it
export const Presentations = new Mongo.Collection('presentations', {connection: null});
/**
* Publications
*/
if (Meteor.isServer) {
// This code only runs on the server
Meteor.publish(PRESENTATION_BY_MAP_ID, (mapId) => {
check(mapId, nonEmptyString);
return Presentations.find({ matchingMapId: mapId });
});
}
no data is being published to the clients.
TLDR: it's not possible.
There is no magic in Meteor that allow data being synced between clients while the data doesn't transit by the MongoDB database. The whole sync process through publications and subscriptions is triggered by MongoDB writes. Hence, if you don't write to database, you cannot sync data between clients (using the native pub/sub system available in Meteor).
After countless hours of trying everything possible I found a way to what I wanted:
export const Presentations = new Mongo.Collection('presentations', Meteor.isServer ? {connection: null} : {});
I checked the MongoDb and no presentations collection is being created. Also, n every server-restart the collection is empty. There is a small downside on the client, even the collectionHanlde.ready() is truthy the findOne() first returns undefined and is being synced afterwards.
I don't know if this is the right/preferable way, but it was the only one working for me so far. I tried to leave {connection: null} in the client code, but wasn't able to achieve any sync even though I implemented the added/changed/removed methods.
Sadly, I wasn't able to get any further help even in the meteor forum here and here

Play Framework Database Related endpoints hang after some up time

I have situation which is almost identical to the one described here: Play framework resource starvation after a few days
My application is simple, Play 2.6 + PostgreSQL + Slick 3.
Also, DB retrieval operations are Slick only and simple.
Usage scenario is that data comes in through one endpoint, gets stored into DB (there are some actors storing some data in async fashion which can fail with default strategy) and is served through rest endpoints.
So far so good.
After few days, every endpoint that has anything to do with database stops responding. Application is server on t3-medium on a single instance connected to RDS instance. Connection count to RDS is always the same and stable, mostly idling.
What I have also noticed is that database actually gets called and query gets executed, but request never ends or gets any data.
Simplest endpoint (POST) is for posting feedback - basically one liner:
feedbackService.storeFeedback(feedback.deviceId, feedback.message).map(_ => Success)
This Success thing is wrapper around Ok("something") so no magic there.
Feedback Service stores one record in DB in a Slick preferred way, nothing crazy there as well.
Once feedback post is called, I notice in psql client that INSERT query has been executed and data really ends up in database, but HTTP request never ends and no success data gets returned. In parallel, calling non DB related endpoints which do return some values like status endpoint goes through without problems.
Production logs don't show anything and restarting helps for a day or two.
I suppose some kind of resource starvation is happening, but which and where is currently beyond me.

Change MongoDB Collection from local to server-side on running Meteor App

Due to the Meteor Docs there are 'server-side', 'client-side' and 'local' Collections. Is there a way to change the 'status' (e.g. if it's server-side, client-side or local) on a running app?
Use Case: A Web-Application where users can register and login. They can store sensible data. Depending on the Users personal preferences he should be able to choose if that data is stored local or on the server (General decision - not from case to case).
Current Approach: It's working fine if I either instantiate the Collection local CollectionName = new Mongo.Collection(null); or server side CollectionName = new Mongo.Collection('collectionName');.
But I can't think of an approach to make it possible to the user that he can change the Collection status.
Is there a way to do this?
Or is a workaround needed (e.g. Create both, a local and server-side Collaction, and just decide which to use for insert/update/find - what would mean a lot of duplicate code?!).
Edit: To make thinks clear: I want the user to be able to choose if his data is stored in a collection which is synced with the server or a collection without any syncing.
No, you can't change the type of a collection on a running app.
I think you are confused about what these terms mean. "Client-side" collections aren't permanently stored in localstorage. It just means it's a collection that's in the browser's memory. Just as "server-side" collections are those that reside in the server's memory. The difference is not how it's defined, but where the code runs. Most collections have a client-side and a server-side counterpart, and they are kept synchronized via pub/sub. Server-side collections are also synchronized with MongoDB (using the oplog).
Local collections can live in both places, but "local" means they aren't synchronized with anything.
I probably don't fully understand what you are trying to do, but local collections do not persist data.
If you pass null as the name, then you’re creating a local collection. It’s not synchronized anywhere; it’s just a local scratchpad that supports Mongo-style find, insert, update, and remove operations. (On both the client and the server, this scratchpad is implemented using Minimongo.)
This means any data added to them on the client will be blown away when the user closes their browser (unless you are also using one of the local collection persist meteor packages) and any data added to them on the server will be blown away when the meteor app is restarted. So I don't think you really want to use local collections.
Instead, I would use a regular collection (where a name is passed to the constructor) and either the standard allow or deny options (not really recommended anymore...but still a valid approach) or Meteor methods (the preferred approach) to control who can change data and what data is allowed to change.
Or, another option could be to pass your publication function a list of fields that the user wishes to see on the client for that given session. To do this you defined a new publication that receives a displayFields argument that you then use as the field specifier options in your collection .find().
Meteor.publish("userData", function (userId, displayFields) {
// validate the structure and contents of displayFields
// retrieve the data but only use the fields that the user requested
return UserData.find({user_id: userId}, {fields: displayFields});
});
Then on the client side you would subscribe to this and pass in the fields the user wishes to make visible on the client.
var displayFields = {
firstname: 1,
lastname: 0,
//...
};
this.subscribe("userData", [displayFields]);

NSMutableURLRequest on succession of another NSMutableURLRequest's success

Basically, I want to implement SYNC functionality; where, if internet connection is not available, data gets stored on local sqlite database. Whenever, internet connection is available, SYNC gets into the action.
Now, Say for example; 5 records are stored locally, and then internet connection is available. I want the server to be updated. So, What I do currently is:
Post first record to the server.
Wait for the success of first request.
Post local NSNotification to routine, that the first record has been updated on server & now second request can go.
The routine fires the second post request on server and so on...
Question: Is this approach right and efficient enough to implement SYNC functionality; OR anything I should change into it ??
NOTE: Records to be SYNC will have no limit in numbers.
Well it depends on the requirements on the data that you save. If it is just for backup then you should be fine.
If the 5 records are somehow dependent on each other and you need to access this data from another device/application you should take care on the server side that either all 5 records are written or none. Otherwise you will have an inconsistent state if only 3 get written.
If other users are also reading / writing those data concurrently on the server then you need to implement some kind of lock on all records before writing and also decide how to handle conflicts when someone attempts to overwrite somebody else changes.

How to guard against repeated request?

we have a button in a web game for the users to collect reward. That should only be clicked once, and upon receiving the request, we'll mark it collected in DB.
we've already blocked the buttons in the client from repeated clicking. But that won't help if people resend the package multiple times to our server in short period of time.
what I want is a method to block this from server side.
we're using Playframework 2 (2.0.3-RC2) for server side and so far it's stateless, I'm tempted to use a Set to guard like this:
if processingSet has userId then BadRequest
else put userId in processingSet and handle request
after that remove userId from that Set
but then I'd have to face problem like Updating Scala collections thread-safely and still fail to block the user once we have more than one server behind load balancing.
one possibility I'm thinking about is to have a table in DB in place of the processingSet above, but that would incur 1+ DB operation per request, are there any better solution~?
thanks~
Additional DB operation is relatively 'cheap' solution in that case. You should use it if you'e planning to save the buttons state permanently.
If the button is disabled only for some period of time (for an example until the game is over) you can also consider using the cache API however keep in mind that's not dedicated for solutions which should be stored for long time (it should not be considered as DB alternative).
Given that you're using Mongo and so don't have transactions spanning separate collections, I think you can probably implement this guard using an atomic operation - namely "Update if current", which is effectively CompareAndSwap.
Assuming you've got a collection like "rewards" which has a "collected" attribute, you can update the collected flag to true only if it is currently false and if that operation doesn't fail you can proceed to apply the reward knowing that for any other requests the same operation will fail.