Need for speed

When doing the first message bombardment on the server and the news are mixed ones. On the one hand the server does not crash, which is nice, but after a while it starts to behave irrationally, like when logging out and logging back in, it does not seem to delete users from the DB anymore, so a kind of measurement is needed. Writing some quick benchmarks it turns out that the Chat Server (CS) can do 600'000 messages per second (mps) and the DB lookup in the chat group can only do about 6'800 mps, with 16 clients connected we get up to 2'600 mps, but I suppose that the constant bombardment becomes a problem at some point, because Erlang starts piling up messages and the missing client deletion from the DB is most likely the same cause, so a first conclusion is that Mnesia can't keep up with all those lookups on the DB and this causes messages to pile up like crazy. Fortunately this was likely to happen and now we have a legal excuse to use the KVS (Key Value Server), which has been completely dormant until now. The KVS will need to grab this kind of data from Mnesia and put it in a local table. The big difference now will be this, the KVS will only load the data from Mnesia every "x" time intervals, like maybe every second or every 5, meaning that we will lose precision in order to gain speed. We will now have to segregate our operations, those that require ultimate precision like close by moveable objects, banks, auction houses, trades and loot operations and others like chat, or even general environment operations that do not require the most precision. And we need to start with the Chat Group structure. This should be really easy to do, we will see if things speed up afterwards. A general throughput of 500'000 mps looks like our boy, but 7'000 mps does not.

And surprise, surprise, the Playstation 3 is not nearly as powerful as hoped for as a server, it's depending on the test 4-10 slower than a Dual core Windows Laptop, averaging so far like 6x slower, how very disappointing. In the CS test it scores at 95'000 mps, the DB lookup only gets 4'400 mps and it takes 24 sec. to create 10'000 CC clients, while the Laptop does that job in 7 sec., OUCH !!!!!

Long live the benchmarks.

Sunweaver