title: Avoiding multiple client side requests on timer
body: <p>I need some ideas... </p>
  
  <p>I'm creating a page in php (using Symfony) that mimics an auction bidding page</p>
  
  <p>The countdown script i'm using has a <code>finish.countdown</code> event which triggers when the script reaches 0, when that happens I need only one person to trigger a follow-on event that goes in and performs a function (like marking it sold and pushes the next item as available). The problem is all of these triggers are living in client side software right now, so there's no awareness of the server state and no awareness of what the other clients are doing, so inevitably all of them are going to have to call something on the server to trigger the follow on activity. What I'm trying to avoid is the potential for 100 different users to all call a script that runs that update function.</p>
  
  <p>How it's working is I'm storing a timestamp in the item with the ending time and that gets refreshed as "bids" come in, but ultimately it's the javascript rendering that timestamp on the client browser and triggering events based on that.</p>
  
  <p>We seemingly can't keep it all server-side because cause cron jobs aren't hooked into the web socket system and it would have to be a persistent daemon process like the one powering the web socket server.</p>
  
  <p>How could we code this so that one, not all client side requests run that function at the same time? Or, are we thinking about this the wrong way?</p>
  
  <p>All ideas welcome :)  Thank you</p>