Increment/Decrement on High Traffic

it causes a problem it needs to wait before it updates because of the atomic lock

I don't think that there is another way than waiting ...

Stop running increment() or decrement() during the HTTP request. Dispatch a job (e.g., UpdateMerchantBalance). The API responds immediately, and your queue workers deal with the lock waiting in the background. The workers will still wait on each other for that specific row, but your web server won't hang and the user won't experience timeouts.

@eskiesirius You shouldn’t be using a single column to hold the balance. You should instead of some form of ledger table, where you write individual increments and decrements as their own rows, and then derive the balance from the sum of those increments and decrements. It’s not “expensive” if you have a proper index in place.