MySQL- Counting rows VS Setting up a counter - mysql

Question

I have 2 tables posts<id, user_id, text, votes_counter, created> and votes<id, post_id, user_id, vote>. Here the table vote can be either 1 (upvote) or -1(downvote). Now if I need to fetch the total votes(upvotes - downvotes) on a post, I can do it in 2 ways.
Use count(*) to count the number of upvotes and downvotes on that post from votes table and then do the maths.
Set up a counter column votes_counter and increment or decrement it everytime a user upvotes or downvotes. Then simply extract that votes_counter.
My question is which one is better and under what condition. By saying condition, I mean factors like scalability, peaktime et cetera.
To what I know, if I use method 1, for a table with millions of rows, count(*) could be a heavy operation. To avoid that situation, if I use a counter then during peak time, the votes_counter column might get deadlocked, too many users trying to update the counter!
Is there a third way better than both and as simple to implement?

Answer 1

The two approaches represent a common tradeoff between complexity of implementation and speed.
The first approach is very simple to implement, because it does not require you to do any additional coding.
The second approach is potentially a lot faster, especially when you need to count a small percentage of items in a large table
The first approach can be sped up by well designed indexes. Rather than searching through the whole table, your RDBMS could retrieve a few records from the index, and do the counts using them
The second approach can become very complex very quickly:
You need to consider what happens to the counts when a user gets deleted
You should consider what happens when the table of votes is manipulated by tools outside your program. For example, merging records from two databases may prove a lot more complex when the current counts are stored along with the individual ones.
I would start with the first approach, and see how it performs. Then I would try optimizing it with indexing. Finally, I would consider going with the second approach, possibly writing triggers to update counts automatically.

Answer 2

As this sounds a lot like StackExchange, I'll refer you to this answer on the meta about the database schema used on the site. The votes table looks like this:
Votes table:
Id
PostId
VoteTypeId, one of the following values:
1 - AcceptedByOriginator
2 - UpMod
3 - DownMod
4 - Offensive
5 - Favorite (if VoteTypeId = 5, UserId will be populated)
6 - Close
7 - Reopen
8 - BountyStart (if VoteTypeId = 8, UserId will be populated)
9 - BountyClose
10 - Deletion
11 - Undeletion
12 - Spam
15 - ModeratorReview
16 - ApproveEditSuggestion
UserId (only present if VoteTypeId is 5 or 8)
CreationDate
BountyAmount (only present if VoteTypeId is 8 or 9)
And so based on that it sounds like the way it would be run is:
SELECT VoteTypeId FROM Votes WHERE VoteTypeId = 2 OR VoteTypeId = 3
And then based on the value, do the maths:
int score = 0;
for each vote in voteQueryResults
if(vote == 2) score++;
if(vote == 3) score--;
Even with millions of results, this is probably going to be a very fast operation as it's so simple.