# Implementing distributed user counters **URL:** \ **Category:** Questions\ **Tags:** distributed, phoenixtracker, pheonix-presence\ **Created:** [June 13, 2025, 8:02am UTC](https://forum.elixirforum.com/t/implementing-distributed-user-counters/71270 "2025-06-13T08:02:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 26
**Author:** ![jaybe78](https://forum.elixirforum.com/user_avatar/forum.elixirforum.com/jaybe78/32/36069_2.png) [@jaybe78](https://forum.elixirforum.com/u/jaybe78)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2025, 2:31pm UTC](https://forum.elixirforum.com/t/implementing-distributed-user-counters/71270/26 "2025-06-16T14:31:01Z")
> So before I suggest anything else, I will say one last time that you should at least _try_ a fully centralized approach first, where you store _all_ topic metadata in one ets table Yes I totally agree and this is what I’ve done done so far. I basically store all the counts in 1 ETS table and I have a balancer algorithm running with highlander (only executed in a single node across the whole cluster doing the balancer for all rooms) > What I am suggesting here is that you turn this consistency problem inside-out. Instead of trying to store an eventually consistent “user count” of each room on _every_ node, you should store _some_ room counts, un-replicated, on each node. So each room has a node that it “lives” on, which maintains its count. This is called partitioning, or sharding. Sharding sounds quite nice yes and I thought about it… BUT the only issue is that if I don’t store all the room counts in the same ETS but partitionned them across nodes, that means my balancer which re-equilibrates rooms won’t be able to do it “globally”, but only with the rooms in its nodes, so there might some room left out… For example: Node 1, you could have : room-1 =\> 30 users room-2 =\> 40 users Node 2, you could have : room-3 =\> 15 users room-5 =\> 20 users Node 3, you could have : room-4 =\> 5 users left Since rooms are partitioned, my balancer won’t be able to merge room-4 with rooms 1, 3 and 5. Instead balancer one node 1 will merge 1 and 2 together balancer one node 2 will merge 3 and 5 together Room 4 cannot be merged with anything. --- _[View the full topic](https://forum.elixirforum.com/t/implementing-distributed-user-counters/71270)._