On 3/22/21 11:58 AM, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
Hello.
One issue that happens is server delays when dealing with big loot.
For instance a player selling some thousands rods can stuck the server for
some seconds... Or even dropping many items on a big pile can be quite slow.
So to handle that correctly, I was thinking of changing the server code like
that:
- split data/commands reception and processing - have one loop that reads from
the socket, put commands in a waiting queue, then another function later
processes those commands
- for commands like pick/drop/examine, enable them to work on multiple
processing loops instead of a single. So for instance the command would drop
100 items, then store its status, put itself back on top of the command
waiting queue, and exit - this way the server can process something else.
Being multi threaded would help some things out.
It has been a while, by my recollection is the drop (and pickup) problem is
that these are in fact handled by the server, eg, 'drop all' is done on the
server, dropping everything of matching criteria. And likewise, pickup all is
done on the server, so slowing down the command processing from the client
doesn't help out.
It is also my recollection in that the reason this is slow that each time an
object is moved (ground to player or vice versa), it has to check the
destination for duplicates to merge them (otherwise, you could have 20
different entries for silver coins). This becomes an O(n^2) operation, so when
dropping a few items, it is pretty fast, but when dropping a stack of 100
different items, that takes a lot of time.
There are a couple ways to deal with this:
- A thought I had a while back is once a space gets too many items on it, items
fall over to neighboring spaces - this would reduce the upper threshhold over
that operation (never too many items to examine on a space), but this could
basically result in an entire shop being filled to a level of 25 items deep.
- For items going to the floor, marking the space as needing 'merging' later on
could be done (one could even imagine something like a shop keeper standing on
the space as this merging is done, preventing players from interacting with it)
- For items going into the players inventory (they step onto a pile of junk),
deferred merging could be done, but would result in new items getting send to
the client, and then and update down the road that the new item does not exist
and in fact item X has a different quantity. I'm not sure how visually that
works out.
- Maybe limit the number of items picked up at once, even with pickup all, to
something like 25 or other number where performance is still reasonable. This
makes it harder to clean up everything in the dungeon, but is somewhat more
realistic (you can only pick up stuff so quickly).
- I can't remember if the gold insertion when selling a bunch of items is
intelligent. That is to say, if you sell 100 items, does is calculate the net
proceeds and inserts it once (intelligent) or inserts the coinage 100 items
(1/each item, keeping in mind that there could actually be several different
coins being inserted for each item). So changing that (deferred gold updating)
could also have some benefit.
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