Part of my latest webapp needs to write to file a fair amount as part of its logging. One problem I've noticed is that if there are a few concurrent users, the writes can overwrite each other (instead of appending to file). I assume this is because of the destination file can be open in a number of places at the same time.

flock(...) is usually superb but it doesn't appear to work on NFS... Which is a huge problem for me as the production server uses a NFS array.

The closest thing I've seen to an actual solution involves trying to create a lock dir and waiting until it can be created. To say this lacks elegance is understatement of the year, possibly decade.

Any better ideas?

Edit: I should add that I don't have root on the server and doing the storage in another way isn't really feasible any time soon, not least within my deadline.