Track image views in a cost-effective manner

Question

I'm looking for a solution to implement sponsored images on one of my GAE apps.

We've got about 5000 users using the app and these sponsored images needs to be tracked every time it is viewed and every time somebody clicks on them.

Somebody suggested having multiple entries for counters, then randomly incrementing these counters in order to get pass the datastore write limit, but if you happen to have two views at exactly the same time and both try to write to the datastore at the same time, the second write will overwrite the first write meaning you lose one view.

At the moment we're creating a new datastore entry for every view and every click and have a scheduler passing it to a queue that adds up all the views and clicks saving the count in a stats entity - not very efficient.

Answer 1

Posting this as an answer :)

You can use a queue with a throughput rate of one task a time, and send the count operations to that queue. That way you will know that only one count operation is preformed each time on counter.