As requested by Rarebit....And Many Others!!

see, one of the biggest problems MxO has, is that we got players trying to convince the extremely limited amount of developers that we have to take on a huge, time consuming project that really wont serve that big of a purpose, and will do absolutely nothing to bring old players back to this game or encourage new players to join.

we could fix a lag issue, which occurs in just one of the 4 districts we already have, and for that matter, is hardly even used because the mega-city is so big and we dont have near enough players to fill it anyways. so why spend hours upon hours trying to fix a lag issue which only occurs in a small area of the whole city, so that some people can go exploring and then RP there.

i think time would be much better spent on adding new content. i understand that bugs which effect certain major areas of the game need to be fixed, but we need to stop getting caught up in trying to fix lag and trying to find typos in missions. i mean, it seems like every patch that comes out, 2/3'ds of it is "fixed such-and-such typo in such-and-such mission." i mean you guys should sit back and read the patch notes sometimes, its pretty pathetic.

like i said, i fully realize we are seriously undermanned on our staff, so we cant expect too much, but sometimes i wonder about which things get priority over others.

Rarebit wrote:

As far as being something initiated by player population goes, I think that's probably the case... My own (relatively technically ignorant) theory is that it has something to do with the fact that that area is the most resource-intensive in the game, due to the plethora of gigantic skyscrapers--that Kalt super-scraper in Park East, for instance, which is in The Lag Zone, is many times more massive, in terms of file size, than any other city block. Supposedly our servers have plenty of spare RAM for the load they're handling, but still, I don't think the resource-intensive nature of the problem area is likely to just be coincidence. I think something in the load-handling algorithm is getting overloaded or out of whack due to dealing with resource sizes that exceed its valid parameters, or something.

That's probably all wrong, but it makes me feel smart to assume that I'm right. =P Can't really test that, though, 'cause removing (and in theory later replacing) some of those skyscrapers would make for some nasty big patches, not to mention breaking the PB arcs and so forth.

Maybe so.  Ironically, Downtown used to be the most lag-free area in the game, at least on my machine.  That's why I used to love hanging out there.  Then one day, the lag started.  I did a search, and the earliest message I could find about the lag was on 8/20/2005.  Considering the content of the message and the fact that forums were reset on 8/15/2005, the lag must have started even earlier.  Note that this was BEFORE Pandora's Box was released on 8/31/2005, so the timing points more towards problems with the server merge.  I hope that info helps a little. 

In any case, I understand where Walrus is coming from, but I think this falls in the super-high-priority-do-whatever-it-takes-to-get-it-fixed category.  I mean, this is a online game where people pay to, among other things, keep the servers running, and you just can't have lag like that in the premium area of the game.  You just can't.

Rarebit wrote:

Roukan wrote:

Do you guys have a guess of what the lag is?

*Tries to remember what Dracomet said...* It's the regionserver that controls that square section of the district trying to spawn a child server to handle what it thinks is a load problem, but it can't create the child server for some reason--it seems to be getting invalid coordinates. So it keeps trying to split over and over, which causes it to eat up all the CPU on that machine, so anything else, like messages about player/NPC actions, etc, can only be handled in a delayed, ie laggy, fashion.

Or that's one of the apparent manifestations, anyway--if I recall correctly. There may be some other real root issue behind it, but the servers currently don't report enough information to tell us why the bogus coordinates are coming up in the first place, and we can't find a way to reproduce the child spawning death spiral on our test servers. There's probably something in particular that kicks it off, but we haven't found what that is yet. It seems to be related to volume of player activity, because the cycle of lag starts up most frequently on more populous servers, even though our servers should be able to handle our normal daily player population just fine.

I don't know what your configuration capabilities are, but as a workaround, maybe you can load a fixed number of processes at boot time and turn off child spawning altogether.  It's not like you have to worry about a population explosion, so you should be able to anticipate how many processes are required.  Sure, there will be times when the population is high in downtown, but even then, I bet the lag won't be as bad as it is now.  Just a thought.

ZippyTheSquirrel wrote:

Me and Mobu were messing around in Downtown lookin' up really tall buildings, but we got distracted by the big lag wall and started following it all around. Thursday, when the server's reset, I'm gonna goof off in Downtown all day and try to record how the lag spreads. O_o who's with meh?

Your map looks about right.  It's pretty close to what someone mapped before:  http://www.matrixreport.com/Downtownlag.htm