[development] help needed: race condition in project_issue when followups are comments

[Derek Wright]

hunmonk, chx, and I have been hard at work bringing the project_issue  
module (which powers d.o's issue queue) out of the dark ages.   
Instead of a bunch of duplicated comment-like functionality for issue  
followups, followups are now handled via genuine core comments[1].   
This solves a bunch of UI and other problems[2], and makes the code  
easier to maintain.

One of the things this will allow is easy deleting of inappropriate  
issue followups (e.g. spam).  However, deleting a followup would  
totally break our current numbering scheme (the little #1, #2, etc  
next to each followup).  We have a solution for this, but it  
introduces a race condition when N people reply to the issue at the  
same time.  One obvious solution to the race is to use DB locks, but  
that's scary from a performance standpoint, especially on d.o.

So, anyone who a) cares about the d.o issue queue, b) cares about d.o  
performance, and/or c) has a lot of DB expertise they could share,  
please read the following issue and comment there:

http://drupal.org/node/180866

Thanks!
-Derek (dww)


[1] http://drupal.org/node/18920
[2] http://drupal.org/node/13221 for example