Lagspike saga

[Grog]

From the very gut feeling it seems to be worse for a short time (a few days?) after every update.
I was wondering if it'S player count, but directly after the restart player numbers are barely at their half.

[DPblH]

Not sure if its just the bots from major factions.

Of course it is bots, they are like to click a lot at speed of light. I'm also heard about clicking bots which starts with the server and clicks a lot because they are bots from big factions.

[pppp]

I tend to blame cache not being filled up after restart, but it's pure guesswork.

[Granger]

Apart from that, regarding the lag spike issue: As far as I understand it there is a way forward, when will it be walked?

I know, I know. I'm just too nervous to do invasive changes as long as things work somewhat well anyway. Not an excuse, just an explanation.

I guess that no one would have problems in case you would announce the following:

On $day at $time I'll shutdown the server, make a backup to a remote location, do the operation and start it up again afterwards.
That will take estimated of $x hours, in case it explodes and I need to restore the backup it'll take about twice as long.
Sorry for the inconvenience, but I have to do what I must (because I can)...

I think most (if not all) would applaud you for this - but the longer you wait with it the more the reaction will be *meh*.

Shameless plug here to raise exposure.

To be more clear on the *meh* comment: My reasoning is that the longer this is ignored the more people will be (understandably) salty about 'why the *#@&%! did they wait that long with fixing it' instead of being happy that the lag is gone.

[shubla]

Maybe not related to the lag but there could be more caching on client side. For example, if client had info about flower menu options before flower menu is opened, clicking flower menus would be a lot smoother experience.
Currently if you have for example, a lot of chickens in a cupboard, and you want to butcher them all quickly, its rather tedious to click the butcher option on all of them, because you have to wait for server to tell you which flower menu options it has.

[boshaw]

Maybe not related to the lag but there could be more caching on client side. For example, if client had info about flower menu options before flower menu is opened, clicking flower menus would be a lot smoother experience.
Currently if you have for example, a lot of chickens in a cupboard, and you want to butcher them all quickly, its rather tedious to click the butcher option on all of them, because you have to wait for server to tell you which flower menu options it has.

You would still have to wait for the server to give you the flowermenu widget id which is also when it gives the options. I don't think there would be any gain here.

Makes me wonder now... if you know what the id will be ahead of time, which is predictable to a degree, can I just send the select wdgmsg with that wdg id and the server will immediately process it.

[shubla]

Maybe not related to the lag but there could be more caching on client side. For example, if client had info about flower menu options before flower menu is opened, clicking flower menus would be a lot smoother experience.
Currently if you have for example, a lot of chickens in a cupboard, and you want to butcher them all quickly, its rather tedious to click the butcher option on all of them, because you have to wait for server to tell you which flower menu options it has.

You would still have to wait for the server to give you the flowermenu widget id which is also when it gives the options. I don't think there would be any gain here.

Makes me wonder now... if you know what the id will be ahead of time, which is predictable to a degree, can I just send the select wdgmsg with that wdg id and the server will immediately process it.

Idea is to have all information required for the opening and selecting option for flowermenu in the client when the item is loaded.
Gain would be that flowermenus would be faster, if your task is to for example, butcher cupboard full of chicken.
There are other common situations where especially people who have high ping have problems with flowermenus. Like splitting bunch of blocks in inventory etc.

Only downside is maybe that more data must be sent to client but there are ways to go around it, like having flowermenu options in the resfiles or something and then just sending mask about which of these are available, or something like that.

Fancier methods: When you open one flowermenu of one item, server would send you fflowermenus for all of items so then it would be faster to click flowermenu from these items.

[boshaw]

Every EST night around midnight-1a I swear there are a series of bad lag spikes out of no where. Surely this has to be some player doing something around this time that is triggering it.

[Granger]

In case the theory of the last spikes being caused by the NVME SSDs used for caching being busy with garbage collection... it could well be triggered by someone logging out so a short while later a bigger amount of map tiles is getting unloaded (saved to disk), pushing the drives into a clean up cycle that makes them stall IO requests.