A way to resolve lag caused by resources?

[Mittell Buurman]

Hello,

Ever since I joined MTA from the veryu beginning, my main interest were Roleplay servers. I joined a few in the past, but they all got the exact same problems.

The longer the server is up, the more data it stores. The more data the server get's , the longer it takes for it to load. Everyone knows that.

But what really pisses people off is that it affects the overall gameplay.

For example:

I've been in MTA:RP for almost a year. And I see the performance of the server going backwards even though we have upgraded our server. With a new CPU you'd think the lag would reduce. Now I know that my laptop isn't the greatest to play GTA in the first place, but when I joined the common Race, RPG, zombie, freeroam server. My Framerate got up to 45 - 60 while in my own server I get nothing more then 9-10 on average.

Other then the server has been DDoSsed and is still a target of the attackers (and I know we are not the only one being DDoSsed, I've seen a lot of servers going down by DDoSSers). Even without those stupid attacks, the server lags.

Recently I have checked the items the server has. It's over 230,000 items. A lot of them are gone, but our MySQL still reads through all those lists.

As I fear, there are a lot of scripts in various resources who have endless loops in them. Yes I want to get rid of them, but I need to select it carefully. But what I am looking for is the following:

- A way to end the lag caused by the scripts

- A solution to the unnessesary data checking.

- A way to get rid of memory occupied useless scripts.

We use MySQL

How can I resolve & figure out what scripts are pretty much useless yet the players do not suffer from it?

For the ones interested, here I monitored the timer.log for approx 20-30 minutes. I couldn't upload it to pastebin since it's over 500 kb.

http://puu.sh/29SA5

[manve1]

if you got XML files, that save data in them, it might be one problem, because as far as i seen on other topics, people were saying that XML files have limited amount of data that they can save then they get laggy

[Mittell Buurman]

We got xml files for things such as manuals, help commands and a few items use them to store data like notes. biggest files are less then 200 kb and we have a total of 588 files, the majority are under 66 kb

[manve1]

look over those scripts, you might find a bit where the lag might come from.

[PaiN^]

What i know is that scripts with lots of triggers and/or timers make lag ..

Check if any of your resources got so many triggers and/or timers ..!

[Mittell Buurman]

From what i've heard from the developers of the script, there's a lot of them in some resources like payday, also with the use of world-items trying to render everything to the player. That's what is causing the lag. So I might need to figure out a way to reduce the amount of timers, it'll require some tiem & research I guess.

[IIYAMA]

or overfull tables and to much element data. (If the server never get restarted.)

also, mta just get heavier and most of the pc's get older.

[Mittell Buurman]

There are over 8000 items in the resources (images, xml files, lua files, etc) it takes up to 189Mb. On my development server I don't get any lag for good reasons. but if that's turned to a public server, overtime I will get the same results.

[IIYAMA]

That sounds like a data overflow.

or even worse, server using HDD as ram.

[Anderl]

Improving the code itself will help, avoid using much timers and anything that uses bandwidth (events, remote calls, element data) and mainly XML, unless it's really needed. They're small files, but they're much - it ends up doing the same AFAIK. I would recommend using SQLite or MySQL (if really needed).

[Mittell Buurman]

We're using MySQL to connect to our UCP. the xml files are mainly used to log a lot of chats.

A lot of timers are used for things like paydays. reviewing all the script requires a lot of work, figuring out a good alternative might be harder.

[Anderl]

I would use onClientRender/getTickCount instead of timers. Also, if the XML files are long, I recommend using any other thing to log the chat.

I suggest you to spend some time re-working your code.

[Mittell Buurman]

Well, It's going to take a long time since I'm not that experienced in coding. Right now i'm tweaking around a bit. When I get the hand of it and everything works and it does fix those timer issues. i'd put it in.