troubleshooting Question
Alternatives to Rand() or mt_rand() - interested in perspectives.
erzoolander asked on
I have an app that I'm developing. It's essentially a voting app - where user submissions are reviewed/voted upon/etc.
On the server side, when I originally began developing it, I figured the most democratic way of approaching submission selection would be through a randomized function like rand() or mt_rand(). In practice, however, both are turning out to be pretty crappy solutions since it's not true randomization. We currently have about 300 submissions - and as we're doing testing it seems like 40-50 of those entries are disproportionately "randomly" selected relative to all of the other ones.
So I'm thinking about approaching it a different way - each of which has it's potential pitfalls.
#1 - return to the app an array of all possible submissions - and have the app just iterate through them.
Pros of this: Every entry - provided the user keeps progressing - has a shot of being reviewed.
Cons of this: The array could potentially get quite large...which would mean at some point I'd have to segment it up (maybe only return a list of 100 possible candidates for review later on).
#2 - Instead of returning the list of possible candidates - handle the selection via sessions.
Pros of this: Every entry - provided the user keeps progressing - has a shot of being reviewed.
Cons of this: A huge number of open sessions possible.
What would you do in such a scenario? I've read that large numbers of sessions being open simultaneously can cause memory problems... How big of a concern ought that be? Or - is there a different way you can picture to approach this issue? :)
Thanks!
On the server side, when I originally began developing it, I figured the most democratic way of approaching submission selection would be through a randomized function like rand() or mt_rand(). In practice, however, both are turning out to be pretty crappy solutions since it's not true randomization. We currently have about 300 submissions - and as we're doing testing it seems like 40-50 of those entries are disproportionately "randomly" selected relative to all of the other ones.
So I'm thinking about approaching it a different way - each of which has it's potential pitfalls.
#1 - return to the app an array of all possible submissions - and have the app just iterate through them.
Pros of this: Every entry - provided the user keeps progressing - has a shot of being reviewed.
Cons of this: The array could potentially get quite large...which would mean at some point I'd have to segment it up (maybe only return a list of 100 possible candidates for review later on).
#2 - Instead of returning the list of possible candidates - handle the selection via sessions.
Pros of this: Every entry - provided the user keeps progressing - has a shot of being reviewed.
Cons of this: A huge number of open sessions possible.
What would you do in such a scenario? I've read that large numbers of sessions being open simultaneously can cause memory problems... How big of a concern ought that be? Or - is there a different way you can picture to approach this issue? :)
Thanks!
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