Multiple Users Accessing Same Database Table

Question

I am creating a Chatting Site where hundreds of users will be going to chat with each other. It is a two way chat means one user can chat with a single user only. Everything is working fine. What i am doing is storing the messages of all the users in a single table of the database and then users are accessing specific chats through some id.

I just wanted to ask will there be any problem if multiple users access the same database table at the same time. What is the limit? With around 4 users it is working fine but do i have to make any changes to handle more than 4 users (say 500).

Site is based on PHP and MySql. I am using ClearDB (Free Plan) for database and site is hosted on Windows Azure.

Answer 1

If you are using PHP as a backend scipt, you probalby are connecting to the database with one signle user (root as default). Your backend script doesn't or shouldn't rely on business layer which are the chat users.

There are plenty of ways to improve performance of this app. If it is a chat app, I recommend using Redis and store archive to database in the background (consider cronjob). One simple task of showing others the message (this is your use case) is too simple to ask RDB to work.

Answer 2

Please take a look here: https://www.cleardb.com/store/azure. Based on this, under free plan, you're limited to 4 database connections so you will sure see performance issues.

You could either upgrade to a better plan or could host your database in a VM.