Best way to implement global counters for highly concurrent applications?

Question

What is the best way to implement global counters for a highly concurrent application? In my case I may have 10K-20K go routines performing \"work\", and I want to count th

Answer 1

The last one was close:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    ch := make(chan int, 3)
    go GoCounterRoutine(ch)
    go GoWorkerRoutine(1, ch)
    // not run as goroutine because mein() would just end
    GoWorkerRoutine(2, ch)

}

// started somewhere else
func GoCounterRoutine(ch chan int) {
    counter := 0
    for {
        ch <- counter
        counter += 1
    }
}

func GoWorkerRoutine(n int, ch chan int) {
    var seq int
    for seq := range ch {
        // do work:
        fmt.Println(n, seq)
    }
}

This introduces a single point of failure: if the counter goroutine dies, everything is lost. This may not be a problem if all goroutine are executed on one computer, but may become a problem if they are scattered over the network. To make the counter immune to failures of single nodes in the cluster, special algorithms have to be used.