A bug caused one or more servers to crash over the past few days. The bug was due to the noncombatant state of NPCs. That bug was fixed.
Load on the servers has continued to be my number one concern this week. I know there are other bugs that need attention but this one is the highest priority.
I made some giant strides toward smoothing out the servers today. Thanks for your patience if you waited through the many server restarts today. That should be all for today.
The largest contributor to the lag was due to a read/write lock on a data structure that was getting locked for write too often. The code was improved to be smarter about when to lock that lock for write.
Here is a little background about read/write locks. They are used to control access to a resource in a multi threaded environment.
Many threads can access a resource simultaneously when they lock the read/write lock for read access. The lock allows many threads to lock it for read at the same time.
However, when a thread must have exclusive access to the resource, the lock must be locked for write. Only one thread can lock the read/write lock for write at the same time. The locking thread waits for all current locks to be unlocked before the write lock is granted.
While a read/write lock is locked for write, any other thread attempting to lock the lock will wait until the write lock is unlocked.
Load on the servers has continued to be my number one concern this week. I know there are other bugs that need attention but this one is the highest priority.
I made some giant strides toward smoothing out the servers today. Thanks for your patience if you waited through the many server restarts today. That should be all for today.
The largest contributor to the lag was due to a read/write lock on a data structure that was getting locked for write too often. The code was improved to be smarter about when to lock that lock for write.
Here is a little background about read/write locks. They are used to control access to a resource in a multi threaded environment.
Many threads can access a resource simultaneously when they lock the read/write lock for read access. The lock allows many threads to lock it for read at the same time.
However, when a thread must have exclusive access to the resource, the lock must be locked for write. Only one thread can lock the read/write lock for write at the same time. The locking thread waits for all current locks to be unlocked before the write lock is granted.
While a read/write lock is locked for write, any other thread attempting to lock the lock will wait until the write lock is unlocked.