Efficient techniques are described for controlling ordered accesses in a weakly ordered storage system. A stream of memory requests is split into two or more streams of memory requests and a memory access counter is incremented for each memory request. A memory request requiring ordered memory accesses is identified in one of the two or more streams of memory requests. The memory request requiring ordered memory accesses is stalled upon determining a previous memory request from a different stream of memory requests is pending. The memory access counter is decremented for each memory request guaranteed to complete. A count value in the memory access counter that is different from an initialized state of the memory access counter indicates there are pending memory requests. The memory request requiring ordered memory accesses is processed upon determining there are no further pending memory requests.