It's not lag -- it's completely clogged.

[Chris]

Draft Tadpole for ProgD!

[TerribleTadpole]

*swims wildly to the bottom of the weedy pond and plunges headfirst into the silt* Mmff ffmmff mfmff!

But seriously folks, I've PM'ed Jos.

[ichi]

For the last day or so Cantr has been running pretty smoothly. However, the lag/clog just hit. I was online when it happened. I saw what caused it. I got an animal attack at the usual time (2263-0.19) and then ship processing began. Ship movement appeared to finish as normal. Then I got another animal attack (2263-0.23) in the same place as before! Clearly animal processing was not finished and had continued through ship processing. Then I got land-movement (2263-0.24) and then (just about the time project-processing should start) the lag began..

It appears to me that this lag/clog was caused by excessive animal processing running over ship processing and into land-movement processing (and perhaps into project processing). It is no wonder we get lag/clog when heavy processes run on top of each other. Add to that the 100 or so users trying to use the system at the same time.

We usually get our worst lag at this time of the day, so it is probably a recurring problem. I suggest we stop animal processing at this time of day. This should significantly improve lag without making a big difference to animal behavior (after all animals are processed at three other times during the day).

[jexter]

If the problems with the server, why not buying a new one? I know it shouldn't be cheap, but maybe there's some money from the donating? (the financial summary is very old though, maybe someone could update it?). We will see how much we have, find a good server and people will donate if we lack money.

I understand not everybody can donate, but everyone could give as much as he can (I personally would not see a problem to give 50 - 100$ from me). If the problem with the server then the answer is clear - we need a new one and better one!

[Doug R.]

http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.ph ... sc&start=0

To answer some points made above:

- Yes, Cantr runs on a dedicated server, no shared hosting
- Yes, moving the forum does not come at an extra cost: as I said, we already have the server. And we already use phpBB It's the time that's lacking.
- No, $1000 would not fix our problems: hosting is not a one-off payment, but continuous - we pay about $100 monthly right now (and we have a pretty good server). So it would only help us for 10 months. Besides, the real problem is time: if we rented a second server, we still need to redo a lot of the code to be able to deal with this .... that said, $1000 could be enough to pay a programmer for a bit and have some of the dirty work done we don't get to
- I find the idea of a downtime somewhat appealing actually - it's an ugly fix, but if it does turn out to help, it might be a good temporary fix. Especially because of the seriously problematic effect of the lag on new players (who might be impatient and leave quickly). We have many processes running several times a day, though - a downtime every three hours would be rather painful.

[Xanalsir]

Playing Cantr is just like war. The lag hits the fan, you put your arms over your face and hope none of it lands on you.

[Zanthos]

but unlike war, it takes days to kill someone.

[tiddy ogg]

As I think suggested somewhere above, grouping all the time-consuming processes togeether and having a down-time every three hours might be the fix. Not the perfect solution, but it's better than the current situation.
I don't know how easy that is to do, anyway, and I wish all luck to Merrill and whoever is working on the solution.