So I'm reinventing the wheel, but this needs to integrate with the rest of our site so Slash or Everything wouldn't easily work. Besides, I always think I can do better :)

Anyway, I'm writing up a bulletin board system, stealing ideas from any other system I can see. To improve performance in retrieving nested threads, I have a mapping field for each message. Like so:
Mapping IDNodeID
10241
20482</td
If node 3 is created in reply to Node 2, it would be inserted with Mapping ID 1536. (The real table has larger differences, to allow more levels of nesting) (Also, the parent-child relationship is recorded, but is irrelevant to this question)

So after a certain amount of nesting (I'm still working through the math), there will not be room for a new MapID, and ALL MapIDs must be recalcuated (I'd actually want to do this a few levels BEFORE required, to allow for detection time). I could either run this in a cron job, or I can have it triggered by the posting script.

My question (finally!) is a procedural one. Should I have a monitoring program check periodically, or should I have the user posting a message trip the program? Should I have the posting script do the work of recalculating the mapping IDs, or should it pass the task to an external program?

In reply to Perl handling of a MYSQL bulletin board by swiftone

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