Um, Game crashed I hope?

[Anonymous]

Is it just me?

[Bebop]

No

[EvilRoeSlade]

You can always check the home page to see if the game is currently running or not.  If it says that Armageddon is not running at that place right above the Recent News section, or if you can't access the home page after repeated attempts, it's a good bet that there was a crash.

[Anonymous]

Well while I do appreciate the tip it would not have worked in this
particular situation. Instead of a 'crash' it was a "players are lagged
and nobody can do anything for five minutes while the game still
runs" sorta thing.

- Anon

[Tyriel]

This is happening a lot lately. Sometimes dangerous!

[Hymwen]

I demand a refund!

[Vesperas]

I already spent your refund on meat pies and animal crackers.

[James de Monet]

crackers.

Hey, no racial slurs!

Question, though: Will the game crash or bog down if you get too many people in the same room?  This would seem logical, and yet, if it can handle that many people in different rooms simultaneously, is it really that different?

Edited to add:

Um, game crashed I hope?

How dare you. *shakes head*

[Xygax]

Will the game crash or bog down if you get too many people in the same room?  This would seem logical, and yet, if it can handle that many people in different rooms simultaneously, is it really that different?

Well, in general, the game itself should be able to handle any number of users in the same room without creating any mayhem.  An issue that may be occurring here, though I haven't really investigated it, is that we're overloading our upstream capacity.  Here why:

In a room with two people, if one person performs an action (an emote, let's say), the server must send the text of that action to the performer and one other person.  Assuming a payload of 80 bytes (80 characters of text in the emote), and overhead of 40 (TCP headers), this means that as a result of that emote, ginka receives ~120 bytes of text.  It then adds on an sdesc (let's assume 30 character sdescs for the emoter) and resends the emote to everyone in the room (including the original sender).  The total upstream send, then, is probably something like 300 bytes ((30 sdesc, + 80 emote, + 40 TCP header,) * 2 sends).  Not bad.  What happens if there are 15 people in the room during this same emote?

Still the same 120 inbound becomes the same 150 per player in the room, which means 2250 bytes.  Still, not bad.  30 players is only 4500 bytes.


But what if all thirty players are moving all at the same time?  Now we get:

"So and so leaves to the west"  (if you're following later in the list, you'll see the people ahead of you leaving) OR
"So and so enters from the east" (if you moved earlier in the list, you'll see the people behind you entering) for every player, PLUS the additional cost of delivering the room text and its contents to each player...

So that works out to be (let's say) about 50 characters of text per-player (sdesc and a short emote, on average), sent to every other player, plus 40 bytes of TCP overhead per player -- assuming some stuff gets coallesced):

30 * 30 * 50 + (40 * 30)= 46200

PLUS room-text:

30 * 500 (four or five lines of 75-character-wide room description text and an item or two on the ground?  I'm probably being generous, since many of our room descriptions are longer and if this much activity is going on, people are bound to have dropped junk on the ground, killed something, left mounts behind, brought NPC guards along, etc. -- no TCP overhead, we're still assuming things are coallesced, though by now we must be getting fragmented) == 15000 for a grand total of about

60kb upstream cost, per move.  I don't know a whole lot about ginka's network topology unfortunately, but I suspect that this is also fine.  There may still be another problem, though, in the way Arm's socket code works.  If YOUR connection can't handle this much data coming down (it's not 60K per move for you, should be much less, in fact, but it's still measurable), the socket-code may be doing something very silly like waiting for YOUR socket to be writable before continuing to process the frame (which would be very very silly, indeed, but it's certainly possible)...

So, the answer to your question is:  while I think in most ways 30 players in the same room shouldn't be a problem, I can imagine "points of failure" where it might become an issue, whether those be in ginka's upstream link, or in the way our socket-code handles pushing out lots of data to the feeble pipes some of our players may have.

-- X

[Hymwen]

Sorry, what...?  :lol:

[LauraMars]

I actually understood all that!

[RogueWarrior]

I... I think I might... I... almost... I... I GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!! SWEET!!!!!!

[James de Monet]

Mmm, yeah, I hadn't thought about the multiplication of outbound data.  30 people in 30 rooms is a 1:1 inbound to outbound data equation:

1(action in room) * 1(echo recipient) * 30(rooms with actors)

But 30 people in the same room raises the amount of outgoing data exponentially:

30(actions in room) * 30(echo recipients) * 1(room with actors)

Makes sense to me.

Thanks Xygax!

Edit: And the 30*500 doesn't even take into account that the room text grows by one line for each new person as they enter the room, so you could be sending 30*500+50*(0,1,2...29) which comes out to 36750.

[Xygax]

Edit: And the 30*500 doesn't even take into account that the room text grows by one line for each new person as they enter the room, so you could be sending 30*500+50*(0,1,2...29) which comes out to 36750.

I don't think that's quite right, but yeah it's another factor I missed (probably smaller than 30*500, though).

-- X

[Xygax]

About how long would it take to rest so that it won't do the wierd login freeze?

While it's true that a good night's sleep will solve many problems, I'm not sure what you mean by "weird login freeze", and I am entirely unsure as to whether resting ginka will cause you to stop experiencing it...

[jhunter]

I've been experiencing a strange freeze that's followed by a disconnect. When I reconnect it takes several times to get past the login without it freezing up and disconnecting me. This has only been happening since the changes and it comes and goes randomly it seems.

[InsertCleverNameHere]

I'm not sure what you mean by "weird login freeze", and I am entirely unsure as to whether resting ginka will cause you to stop experiencing it...

I think I know, it happened either last night or the night before, too. All the sudden the game will get incredibly laggy, then freeze up entirely. Eventually you either log off or it disconnects you. Wait a minute, log back on and it boots up just fine, but, the minute you try to do anything you realize it's completely frozen up again.

This's happened to me a couple times lately. Took me 15 minutes the other night, just to be able to log on long enough I could sign out instead of just be linkdead. Tonight wasn't as bad, maybe 7-10ish minutes for it to clear up enough I could stand, move one room, and quit out.

[amoeba]

I'm not sure what you mean by "weird login freeze", and I am entirely unsure as to whether resting ginka will cause you to stop experiencing it...

I think I know, it happened either last night or the night before, too. All the sudden the game will get incredibly laggy, then freeze up entirely. Eventually you either log off or it disconnects you. Wait a minute, log back on and it boots up just fine, but, the minute you try to do anything you realize it's completely frozen up again.

I had that as well. it -acted- like a runaway process. It was very short lived and I simply disconnected the session and logged back in a few moments later.

[Hymwen]

Okay, this is getting annoying... Arm just crashed for the third time in 10 minutes. 5th or 6th time today.  :?

[Morrolan]

It seems to me that these seem to be happening within 5-10 minutes of the hour change each time.  I could be wrong, and that could just be a skewed perception, though.  Just throwing out this info for confirmation.

Morrolan

[jhunter]

It's been happening for about half an hour now. I can't stay connected to the game for more than 2 or 3 minutes at a time without getting the freeze and disconnect.
Then it takes me several tries to get through the login menu.

[ashyom]

Arm isn't crashing (to clear up these misperceptions), it's lagging us.  The powers that be are working on getting this issue cleared up.
-Ash

[chang]

Really curious as to why it's happening.  Please fill us in, powers that be.

[Yokunama]

Arm isn't crashing (to clear up these misperceptions), it's lagging us.  The powers that be are working on getting this issue cleared up.
-Ash

Thanks, Ash.

[Xygax]

Actually, to clear up the clear-up, we believe that the events are happening upstream of us, which means that the "powers that be" are folks at SBC.

-- X