Great timing, I just asked in #15 to add the re-read functionality to all servers.

This looks like a good start, but 2 things.

1. You're actually rereading the file after the response has been sent, so the new values won't be sent until the next request.
2. We need to do this in the POST handler as well, otherwise we may overwrite changes in the file.

Hey Paul,

I just moved the comments array update from the readFileSync to the top of the GET request, so that the comments array will be updated first before it is sent out in the response.

I originally had the comments update occur after the response was sent because of potential async problems with reading the file system but I realize we're using the synchronous version of readfile so it'll block before updating the comments variable and sending it out.

Also, I don't know if the POST handler needs a change since it looks like on post it already updates the comments array before writing to the _comments.json file and sending out the response.

If the file is modified after the last GET but before the POST, we'll overwrite those changes with what we have in memory + the new comment. Instead we can just stop storing the comments in memory and only read from + write to disk.

Also FYI: you could use the async fs methods - since we're using express, the response doesn't actually send until res.send is called. You could do that in a callback if you wanted. But I don't actually think it's an important detail here so it's not really worth it :)

Removed the comments variable from memory and now all I/O is done from writing or reading from the disk. Also, changed the fs methods from the sync to async methods and put the res.send(s) in their callbacks.

Thank you for your suggestions!

Ah, it looks like our bot wasn't set up right for this repo. Can you sign the CLA - https://code.facebook.com/cla - and then this is good to go.