state is read at startup and written at exit of an event execution. So other threads will not see a change until after the 'write/change thread' exits
atomicState is written to and read from the db. so you see changes 'as they happen'
mixing atomicState and state for variable is generally bad. It can appear to work, but if you write it both with atomicState and state, the state may re-write the variable when an event execution ends.
There are other ways to deal with data across executions - see:
