I would like include the ability for people to rate posts on my site
from 1 to 5. I would like to then display the average rating for each
post. To compute the average each time is obviously database and cpu
intensive. I have been thinking about the best solution. I could
certainly use a cache and expire it every x minutes. However, I don’t
want to reinvent the wheel. Is there already a ROR plugin solution out
there that I don’t know about? If not, does anyone have any good links
on this subject?
Thanks for all of your time and effort on this great project.
Ethan Schreiber
You probably should store the average (A) and number of votes (N) for
each
post. Then, to display the rating of a post, you query for A in the
database. When a new rating is submitted, you compute A and you
increment N.
Note: of course, A must be stored in float (or whatever) and rounded for
display 
Does this help?
Nicolas B. wrote:
You probably should store the average (A) and number of votes (N) for
each
post. Then, to display the rating of a post, you query for A in the
database. When a new rating is submitted, you compute A and you
increment N.
Note: of course, A must be stored in float (or whatever) and rounded for
display
Does this help?
Thank you for your response.
Yes that is one solution that would work. However, then I would be
keeping track of individual votes as well as the total. (I need the
individual votes as well.) It seems redundant. On top of that, I need
to worry about the transaction of modifying the average column which can
run into multi-threading problems. I was looking into memory cache
solutions where i can compute the average and store it in a cache and
perhaps invalidate the cache ever 10 or 15 minutes. This lagtime would
be acceptable.
Is memcached the cache solution i should be using with ROR?