Maybe a write cache, like on hard drives with write back caching. If you first wrote the update to a cache (queue of updates). Then it would be written to both the cache (cached html for instance) and database in one transaction.

But I think it sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

The key is that you have to be prepared for everything to evaporate if the server cycles its memory for whatever reason. In this specific case, we toss everything out of the sandboxes every 5 minutes & reset them anyway, so it's no great tragedy if they clean up after themselves from time to time.

For something with a ton of low-priority edits (like HN or Reddit where nobody sues you if their vote goes away), you could certainly get away with caching updates and only saving them out every once in a while.