Lag Monster Challenge

[Techron]

I like a good challenge, but the lag has become ridiculous. Is the new Rage Skill at fault? Seems coincidental that there is so much lag since its inception. I saw a global announcement from "Purple" that the lag has been caused by dead accounts and those will be purged. If the accounts aren't read into memory, I don't see how that could be the cause. Just my opinion.

On the other hand, it is a good monster, I just wish it gave some experience and drops.

Techron

[Jenalya]

I saw a global announcement from "Purple" that the lag has been caused by dead accounts and those will be purged. If the accounts aren't read into memory, I don't see how that could be the cause. Just my opinion.

The server works with simple text files, including one big file for the playerdatabase, so those accounts are read into memory.

[Techron]

I should look at the architecture of the game before making judgement. Sorry...

Maybe write a cron to auto archive the "stale" accounts?

Techron

[Freeyorp101]

Maybe write a cron to auto archive the "stale" accounts?

The servers need to be offline while unused accounts are purged. Doing so when not needed would be disruptive.


---Freeyorp

[Crush]

As far as I know, account purging isn't necessary anymore because this part of the code was heavily optimized. Also, the symptom when an account purge became necessary, was a very long server response time during login. Response time while playing wasn't affected.

When you are experiencing bad network performance while playing there are a lot of other possible reasons which need to be explored. The first thing to research would be to find out who is affected by this: Only one person, several people (who have something in common like ISP, operating system, or geographical location), or everyone.

Btw: Moved to General Support

[Freeyorp101]

The char-server now forks for writes, so it doesn't block inter-server tasks like it used to. It's not really optimised, as it still has some very heavy writes and takes up a lot of memory, but it shouldn't have the same impact on gameplay that it once did.


---Freeyorp

[o11c]

Besides overall memory consumption, the two main problems with the current (login-server AND char-server) are linear search and having to write the whole db when something changes. The first is trivial to fix in my rewrite, if I haven't already (sort by ID, with an extra map from name-to-ID for the initial login), the second can be solved by implementing a "delete" message and appending to the file (or writing to another file and using includes), only periodically rewriting (probably on server startup, since shutdown should be fast - we don't want to get SIGKILL). (Remember, the whole file would not be stored in memory, only the accounts that are not deleted. And the file is never read after server start). Though actually, if I want to make this SQL-ready, I probably want to split storage into a separate server than the public-facing servers. Still waiting for a nonblocking SQL ... I have learned about "prepared statements" that ease my other fears.

That said - with the forking, it *shouldn't* have any delay on the map-server. But, I've learned enough not to trust tmwA at anything.