Вот по загрузке кому интересно.Georg Zoeller
Designer
Joined: 27 May 2003
From: Edmonton, AB Posted: Saturday, 03 April 2004 05:41AM
Quote: Posted 04/03/04 02:14:32 (GMT) by tunafishsandwich
Georg..i was not saying that the allegory you posted was at all inflamitory. I was reading another topic right before this one, where the dev got a little too defensive.
I was just asking that we *all* make an effort to be more courteous...
that being said, I thank you for your postings..it is a breath of fresh air to get some meaningful responses from the devs. I realize that you guys are probably busy with stuff, but every once in a while, throw us dogs some cookies!
Hi
The Ugly
The recent bad atmosphere on this board threads was mainly caused by a single person who agitated his friends/players into coming here and bump the threads he created with the sole intention of offending people and creating flame wars. That problem has been permanently fixed and any other attempt to disrupt our community will be dealt with swiftly.
Please understand this:
Some of the problems posted by this person on this board were valid and had not been reported yet, others were known and already in our database. However the person did not send a single valid bug report (or included to many swear words and got it deleted by the filter) but instead posted hostile and inflammatory topics on this boards - this is not the way to get the things that are troubleing you fixed (since the topics were written in a very hostile language, nobody here cared about verifying their validity). The people here at BioWare are very passionate about their work and we care about our products (you will find very few other companies out there that supports their products over such a long time). We are however only humans, and when confronted with open hostility, childish behavior or straight insults our commitment to care for a persons problems will be impacted. Frankly I couldn't care less for the problems reported by someone who calls me a "dirty wh*re or c*** s****er" on his website.
Now on to the cookies (taste varies by perception)
I) CPU 30% on empty server -
Yes, in our database, priority rated as low due to the fact that gameplay is not affected in any way, after all no player is on the server.
There seems to be some misconceptions about the importance of CPU load here:
The server has a default cpu load of 99%. It sleep()s every few frames in order to allow other applications to execute, effectivly dropping the cpu load to the number you see when calling top.
Probably we could call sleep() more often when nobody is on the server in order to drop the cpu load generated by the server, but as said, this is low priority as it does not do anything to improve gameplay. CPU load 30% on an empty server does not mean that the game is wasting 30% CPU on doing nothing.
Again, I agree that it would be nice if the server would degrade CPU load down to 10% when nobody is playing in order to allow other applications to execute more frequently.
II) CPU load increasing after 30's player - The issue is known and has been put on hold, reason below. The issue itself looks like the game is exceeding some limits in it's memory management or caching systems, probably causing it be less efficient and more cpu expensive with it's tasks. Since setup required to reproduce this problem is time and resource intensive, work on it has been put on hold until the below managed changes to the game's resource management systems have been finished.
III) High CPU load in general
First - 90% CPU load is not a problem per se - it becomes a problem when game performance is significantly decreased at the same time. There are a couple of problems we are aware of that cause high CPU load, especially with a very high number of players. A couple of them seem to be related to certain intel chipsets and could not be reproduced reliably here to fix them. Other reasons have been mentioned earlier in this thread (placeables and pathfinding, heartbeats, etc). The game's network messaging protocol is highly compressed (NWN has a very low bandwith requirement compared to other games), however this is taxing to a servers CPU with a lot of players, especially if some those players have mediocre or bad connections.
A couple of potential problems have been fixed internally, some can't be fixed (i.e. CPU not powerful enough to support 64 players) the others are on hold, reason again below.
The Good
The Live Team is currently investigating a sigificant update to the games underlying resource management and caching system. Preliminary tests have shown a tremendous increase in game performance (around 40% frame rate for some areas) and they expect a significant performance increase for the dedicated server, especially for machines with a lot of RAM (which could be able to keep most of the game resources in memory all the time).
Currently there are a couple of unresolved issues with this change - if they manage to get those ironed out in time, this update could be available with patch 1.63, if not, the change will have to wait for an upcoming patch.
If this change goes through, there is a decent chance that it might solve many of the issues mentioned in this forum, so investigation on those issues has been put on halt for a while.
Finally I want to add this:
NWN is not designed to run 100+ megabytes modules with several hundred areas in them, everyone doing this is asking for trouble. We disregard and delete any complaints to
[email protected] that report performance problems with those setups unless they can provide instructions on how to reproduce a problem on a much smaller scope.
We have made clear from the start that running persistent worlds with this size, is not the scope NWN was created for and, while we are not artifically create hurdles for people who want to try this, we can not concentrate our resources on fixing problems arising from those setups.
A module with several hundred areas and hundreds of megabyte size is operating far beyond NWNs specifications, the overhead for object management and event handling alone will be literally eating up your processing power and memory, even before a single creature has run their AI. Even with the most careful design and a scaled down creature AI, the game will never reach the performance some people expect it to have. As mentioned before, there is a reason why we distribute our official campaign in several smaller modules instead of making one huge one - NWN can't handle it. People running these setups can somethimes experience a 50-60% or more cpu load on an empty server or higher loads with a lot of player.
Please do not misunderstand the above statement as an attack on the server admin community in general, it is not - many people here run servers in a smaller scope and are experiencing problems with the multiplayer aspect of the game - and those are valid bugs. An example would be lag with 20 or 40 players on a sufficiently powerful server with enough bandwith.
That said, we are interested to know what issues pose the greatest problems for both the regular server admin community and the PW community.
Maybe it would be nice if I could get a list the top 10 problems that are affecting you the most (I know, everyone has their own opinion, but we should be able to get some kind of trend), the reason why they are problematic and if possible, steps to reproduce them. This can also include feature requests (like the extended banlist). While I can not promise anything, I can at least make sure that the list gets on the Desk of the Live Team producer
I'm hoping for some constructive dialog here, please do not let the trolls take control here anymore.
_________________
georg zoeller
technical designer
HotU - Hordes of the Underdark
Jade Empire
Edited By Georg Zoeller on 04/03/04 05:57:50