Database locking/transactions techniques for browsergame PHP/MySQL

Networking and Multiplayer Programming

Started by gdops July 23, 2012 04:56 PM

1 comment, last by Navyman 11 years, 8 months ago

101

Author

July 23, 2012 04:56 PM

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering what's the proper way to handle concurrent actions in a browsergame, that access the same resource (e.g. one player's warehouse), combined with the "on view" method instead of cronjob.

Basically that means, instead of running some script that processes the action queues each second, the calculations are made when that resource (warehouse) is accessed the next time (e.g. one attacks and take resources, or the player itself spends some of them).

Problem obviously occurs when two players access the same resource at the same time, and I'm not sure if there's a good-proven standard way to implement this...

Some guesses of me would be:

1. Using MySQL transactions (one transactions includes: read from actions table, execute them, delete executed actions)
2. Using MySQL table lock for actions table
3. Locking with PHP flock()
4. Using semaphore with PHP sem_acquire()

Any suggestions?

hplus0603

11,916

July 25, 2012 10:16 AM

There are several standard ways of solving the simultaneous-update problem. For example:

1) Use a database transaction around the entire thing (and, if MySQL, make sure transaction isolation is "serializable.")

2) Use a manual spinlock, using something like a short-lived key in memcached to automatically remove it if the process crashes.

3) Use consistent hashing to map update requests for a particular "ID" go to a particular server and thread/instance; this makes updates for a particular "ID" be inherently serialized.

4) Use a worker queue to serialize updates that need to be done.

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