On the Lag

[Chance]

As many of you are well aware, roughly two months ago the performance of the game took a drastic drop despite having been stable in the past even with activity levels much higher than our current amount. This has meant a lot of stressful debugging on our end with the eventual conclusion that we lack the ability to see what's causing it with the usual CPU profile tool. 

When we did update the engine recently, it showed us that an internal engine proc called sendmaps() is the cause. So we're doing something recent to trigger that which we can't diagnose right now, and we're waiting on an update to give us the tools to figure out what's happening.



To put it in perspective, here you see that the total CPU is 97%. High! But 95% of that comes from the internal sendmaps() function, with our own code only being 2% or so.

On Monday we should be getting improved profiling that'll hopefully let us pinpoint where the problem is. 


It's temporary, but for now we'll have to endure it...

[Whatever]

We're about to discover how to defeat lag, boys. Hop on the hype train.

[Chance]

Promising news about the most recent optimization (that turned all the flowers red!) is that it looks to have reduced our average CPU by player from around 0.8% to 0.5%, but we'll see how it is later tonight at peak times. Basically, the way the engine handles objects means unseen overhead, and we had a ton of decals that could have been turfs instead since they're purely visual (which skips that overhead). Fingers crossed!

[Chance]

...

Better than expected. The recent changes halved our overall performance costs! So the death of lag is here. Enjoy.