Genesis's Performance Issues

[Maze]

I'm a bit curious about Dawn of Light's performance when it comes to large amounts of players now that we have this server showing up and having absolutely terrible performance with 1000+ players.

To what extent could these issues be blamed on the DoL core code? The only server we've seen that has reached comparable numbers is Uthgard, and their code has been modified a lot.

Or is it more likely that their issues are self inflicted?

With these thoughts in mind, are there any things in DoL that are known to need work for performance purposes?

[tobz]

It's hard to accurately gauge that sort of thing. There are a lot of things that get slower as the player counter goes up. Timer accuracy goes down as you have to update more and more things per timer tick. The more players in a zone, the more internal relocation happens every time the relocation timer ticks. The more mobs in a zone, the longer the NPC behavior timer takes.

For example, as you have more and more players in the view range (which is like... 3600 units?), every position update gets broadcast to every other player. Say you have twenty players all within view range. Every second, or whatever the position update interval is, you're sending 20 * (20 - 1), or 380 position update packets. If that goes up to 50 players, that's 2,450 position update packets.

Those are only a few of the things that could get slow/jacked up as the player count goes up. Self-inflicted vs. limitations in the DoL code as it stands? It probably leans a little more towards DOL, but that's because most of the servers that get these high player counts are either forked too far (Uthgard) or they're not doing anything novel to solve their problems (Genesis) and hve no actual code optimizations to contribute back. My guess is that they're probably just disabling zones and removing mobs. It's clear to most technical people from reading their posts that they are just sort of prodding blindly trying to make things faster. Setting the priority of the game server process, or "compiling for 64-bit," etc.

They're telling us they have a lot of dev manpower, so we'll see how things play out.

[Tolakram]

Do they know to bump up the number of cores in the config to match their hardware? I forget the exact option but it helps as long as they aren't running on a virtualized box.