Horrible Lag

[loftar]

Ah, I had some problems here at home -- the server at my place (rather than Jorb's) is running the DNS, and it just had a little trouble. It should be fixed now.

[Tanithal]

Nope. The lag is still unbearable, and I think the server went down as I'm typing. This game is great, I love it, I love my log cabin, I love my little farm. But if you guys don't fix the lag problem, you're gonna lose many players.

[Jfloyd]

Well, if we loose enough players, the ones that have been here for over a few months will stay, and enjoy their lag free game.

[Delamore]

Well, if we loose enough players, the ones that have been here for over a few months will stay, and enjoy their lag free game.

Yeah no, that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard "We should lose players that might become long time members for the older players!" This is the same elitist shit Goons had to deal with but in this case it just applies to all new players.
This type of wide spread opinion causes stagnation, at least the devs don't feel the same as the elitist players and have been helping with newbie drives.

[KoE]

I do believe the fine art of sarcasm has been lost on you, Delamore.

At least I hope that was a (bad) joke attempt on JFloyd's part.

[Jfloyd]

I was being sarcastic Delamore. It was supposed to mean that it'd be a cycle. I appoligze for not stating that.
Once the game was lag free, there'd be another rush of newbies. The game would lag, they'd all leave again, and we'd be the only ones that realize that Jorb and Loftar are on a limited server budget etc.

[loftar]

Well, at least I seem to have found out now why gprof didn't work on the server. I'll do a shutdown sometime again and try to profile it. Hopefully, that will let me optimize its CPU usage as much as I'd like.

(The technical explanation why gprof didn't work, for anyone interested, is because it uses setitimer(2) on Linux to do its statistical time profile, and it seems that such timers do not carry over forks, so the profiling stopped as soon as the server daemonized. Hacking in a call to __monstart, which restarts the timer manually, seems to fix the problem.)

Though, the CPU usage problem is by far the smallest. The largest problems are, as I stated previously, the account database and Apache. I've found an old computer of mine that I think we'll try to transfer Apache to during our next dev session, and I'll have to take a brawl with the account server.

[Jfloyd]

I understood the part about forks. Nothing else xD