All 3 ways are possible with ETS:
I usually choose the middle ground so my ets table is always consistent and reads are parallel
I think you have a major problem waiting to bite you here. If your global GameStore process crashes, it’ll be restarted with a new pid that isn’t the owner of the private table. In fact the private table will automatically be deleted when the owner terminates, so your looking at dumping all your state in the event of a crash at the moment.
Personally I’d probably have the processes write to the ETS tables directly without a gatekeeper (making it public) or have a table per-game depending on what’s easiest for your application.
Yea you are right, I haven’t thought about this.
While it is unlikely for the game genserver to crash but it is not impossible.
I will reconsider my approach and maybe use public tables not tied to a genserver.
Thank you guys, for all your suggestions I ended up spawning a new genserver for every game and store the individual game state in its own genserver, the genserver gets automatically shut down when the game ends.
This strategy ensures that a single genserver will not block processing updates to the games and
This has worked pretty well for me till now.
The game is complete check it out here, I also wrote a detailed post about it here