The time allotment system is fundamentally flawed
Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 1:50 am
I realize that the slow server performance is something that the "Powers That Be" are well aware of.. but it has made painfully obvious a flaw in the way they have structured the time allotted to each player. By measuring the "time since last click" method it punishes those who try to be thoughtful, while rewarding those who hit the system hardest.
Since they system now routinely takes 2 to 3 minutes to serve up a page, I have taken to just iconifying (minimizing) the window, and working on something else. The upshot is that it's often 15-25 minutes before I get back to that window. During this time I have not been hitting the server at all, and my impact is minimal. Now I'm faced with a dilemma. If I interact with that window, I face a penalty of 20+ minutes out of my allotment, which means that I don't even have time to check to see if anything has happened to my 5 characters using this technique.
If however, I just interact with the server as fast as possible, going back through the login page every time, then I get stuff done faster, and I don't pay that 20 minute idle penalty, but this puts a much higher load on the server.
The upshot of all this is that those how are trying to be "good citizens" and not interact with the server as fast as they can are penalized for their behavior, and those who do abusive things like loading up 5 pages in parallel are rewarded.
There needs to be a metric of usage that doesn't discourage good behavior, but still gives a fair allotment of access. I don't know what kind of system could be implemented within the constraints of Apache/PHP/Mysql (what I'm assuming this site is built upon,) but I'm willing to help with system rearchitecting if you would like to use a "guaranteed" scheduler like the one implemented in some operating systems. (A guaranteed scheduler guarantees that if there are N processes, a process can get at least 1/Nth of the processor time on average.) This probably means that we'd have to do some black magic with the PHP, since the default apache PHP module is strictly FIFO.)
Since they system now routinely takes 2 to 3 minutes to serve up a page, I have taken to just iconifying (minimizing) the window, and working on something else. The upshot is that it's often 15-25 minutes before I get back to that window. During this time I have not been hitting the server at all, and my impact is minimal. Now I'm faced with a dilemma. If I interact with that window, I face a penalty of 20+ minutes out of my allotment, which means that I don't even have time to check to see if anything has happened to my 5 characters using this technique.
If however, I just interact with the server as fast as possible, going back through the login page every time, then I get stuff done faster, and I don't pay that 20 minute idle penalty, but this puts a much higher load on the server.
The upshot of all this is that those how are trying to be "good citizens" and not interact with the server as fast as they can are penalized for their behavior, and those who do abusive things like loading up 5 pages in parallel are rewarded.
There needs to be a metric of usage that doesn't discourage good behavior, but still gives a fair allotment of access. I don't know what kind of system could be implemented within the constraints of Apache/PHP/Mysql (what I'm assuming this site is built upon,) but I'm willing to help with system rearchitecting if you would like to use a "guaranteed" scheduler like the one implemented in some operating systems. (A guaranteed scheduler guarantees that if there are N processes, a process can get at least 1/Nth of the processor time on average.) This probably means that we'd have to do some black magic with the PHP, since the default apache PHP module is strictly FIFO.)
