MemberService Get and Save best practice

Questions
1

I am saving member information via MemberService and want to know what is the best practice for using MemberService.

At the moment I am using MembersServices a little like this:

public class MyClass
{

  private IMemberService _memberService;

  public MyClass(IMemberService memberService)
  {
     _memberService = memberService;
  }

  public void SaveMyMember(int id)
  {
        var member = _memberService.GetById(id);
        member.SetValue("happy","always") ;
        _memberService.Save(member);
  }
}

There is a problem with the above code as we are making two calls to the database, one to get the member and one to save the updated member value. This isn’t a problem with a few members but at scale, we are seeing Deadlocking problems and believe it would be better to read the member data from Examine, then have a single call to MembersServices to save the member.

This however doesn’t seem to be possible as you need a copy of IMember to pass to _memberService.Save and it looks like the only practical way to get IMember is via _memberService.GetById(id).

Any ideas, taking into account hundreds of thousands of members and thousands of member update requests per member?

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://our.umbraco.com/forum/106497-memberservice-get-and-save-best-practice