Gecko O'Bac
Deep Core Mining Inc.
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Posted - 2010.12.10 20:36:00 -
[2]
 Originally by: Epitrope
Originally by: Black Dranzer
Thought off the top of my head: Do you think it's possible that the size of the timestep is partially responsible for slowing things down? I know it seems counterintuitive; In most situations increasing the step frequency would just bog things down further. But it doesn't seem impossible that a good portion of calculation time is burnt up in compensating for the "fuzzyness" of large timesteps. Alternatively, maybe it's in part the other way around; There might be computations that are done once a second that really don't have to be. Of course, variable sized timesteps for multiple interlocking things would be an enormous pain in the ass.
I actually came up with a similar idea a while ago, and I've always been curious about why EVE isn't set up this way. A node dies when it starts to consistently miss its heartbeat, right? And it misses its heartbeat when it can't do a tick's worth of computation in 1 second. So: under heavy load, why not up a tick to 2 seconds? Send out an update to all the clients, and make everything that happens on that node take twice as long. This, it seems to me, would scale to any number of players (so long as those players are patient)... if it takes longer than 2 seconds to do a tick, go up to 3 seconds/tick, and so on. I would think that most players would prefer a slower but working solar system than a faster broken one, and it means that a node would never have to die again.
Has this idea been considered? If so, why has it been rejected?
From what we know, I doubt this would solve the problem (unless there really are computations that are unneeded for a 1 s timestep). See, the problem is not exactly that if you don't complete the tasks in 1 second you miss the beat... It's that we're using 100% of the resources of the node (CPU first... Dunno if memory gets loaded as well... Perhaps jita is more of a high memory lower cpu usage kind), so the computations simply start being queued until the point where they simply timeout due to the amount of backlogged work. Augmenting the size of the timestep would perhaps let the server "live" longer (the hearbeat pulse though is sent 2 times per minute IIRC), but I doubt it'd make the lag any better.
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