Server with scale testing

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GoogleFrog

8 years ago
(edited 8 years ago)

The first server update with visible user throttling is soon to be released. This is part of ongoing work to make the server able to scale to a large number of players. Currently, everyone can see everyone else and this works for a few hundred users. However, the server is expected to die with the load under even conservative release estimates (at least for a short period right after release, which is when stability is most important).

The change amounts to reducing the usefulness of the user list in #zk. Other players will not appear to be online unless you share a battle room or non-#zk channel with them.

We understand that this hurts the usefulness of #zk for our current community, however, the feature needs testing. We plan to enable full visibility throttling for #zk for a few days. After we are happy that it works we plan to throttle visibility after the first 100 people in #zk, effectively reducing the user list to its current usefulness when the user count is low.

Third party lobbies may be broken by the change. SWL has received an update. I have not heard anything from the developers of other lobbies. ZKL is still supported, for now, so has an update for the change.

Edit by

Licho
TEST IS NOW COMPLETED

#zk is set to display max 100 people so it should not affect anything now. Thank you for your patience, we found few bugs that slipped our internal testing and made several improvements to it.

+6 / -2

Failer

8 years ago

So zk chat will not work at all, or it will only not show players, still showing their #zk messages?
Also, it will make friends list more usefull, so, since when i used it last time it was showing every person separately, a collapsable friends list could become handy.

+0 / -0

ikinz

8 years ago

It won't show all players, but you'll still see their messages in #zk.

+0 / -0

gajop

8 years ago

What's a "collapsable friends list"? Any example?

+0 / -0

GoogleFrog

8 years ago

I think

Failer dislikes the ZKL friend list which effectively puts you in a channel for each friend you have.

+0 / -0

Sortale

8 years ago

example of collapsible friend list from League of Legend [not my friend list of course] most IM chat client use this kind of lay out I think, you can check Pidgin for an other example

+1 / -0

PowerGuy

8 years ago

a couple hundred?
that's optimistic.
still,good to fix things.
maybe in the future some sort of chunking could be done- provided it wouldn't be too confusing for new players,I guess

+0 / -0

Failer

8 years ago
(edited 8 years ago)

Thats exatly what i meant,

GoogleFrog.
If you (possibly) had a couple of dozens of friends, having them all listed by default in your chat list could be at least a bit confusing. Having two groups of off- and online friends, both with this little clickable arrow to hide the list would help a lot.

+0 / -0

Licho

8 years ago

He means ZKL

+0 / -0

Firepluk

8 years ago

before doing visibility throttling you should consider
- using more efficient serialization
- batching of update messages, more users -> bigger batch, more update delay in clients
only that 2 changes should allow us to operate on >10k users easily on any decent hardware

Current implementation is unacceptable and buggy, I don't see half of the people nor I can normally talk with them
guys join my battle room but I don't even see who
W T F

+3 / -0

Orfelius

8 years ago
(edited 8 years ago)

~~I don't see how not getting user data will help with the server stability over all but ok?~~ Nevermind I do understand it now.

I'm just hoping that this wont be a thing that persist the whole way towards the eventuall Steam release, which may be a couple of months ahead or a whole year who knows. I mean... current bugs aside this straightforward damages the community and the game feels even more dead than it in fact is. Not only that but even after the Steam release I don't expect thousends of players pouring in and crashing the playerlist so could we have our chat freedom back after the release happens and the initial crowd disperses? That would be baller.

+2 / -0

Sortale

8 years ago

uhm I am pretty sure that given the current system and current player base, no one would see any change. I have never seen the zk player list reach 50 personally and that is still way below the 100 limit.

I am not very active though so may be other player do frequently see over 100 players. I have no idea.

+0 / -0

Senaven

8 years ago

quote:
guys join my battle room but I don't even see who
W T F

LUL! Resign!

+1 / -0

Licho

8 years ago

Please report any bugs you encounter (to github).
I track no issues atm..

Serialization helps but not much..
With old protocol server would die at around 400 connecting at once (400x 400 messages).

If you cut message size by 30% due to efficient serialization that same limit is reached at 456 people instead.
Silly difference.

If you instead remove the n^2 factor you can reach tens of thousands people with the same traffic budget.

+2 / -0

yanom

8 years ago

Is cleanrock around right now?

Hey cleanrock, will flobby support the new server? It's a great lobby program and I want to keep using it.

+0 / -0

snackuser

8 years ago

featuring this to see how it plays

+1 / -1

Licho

8 years ago

TEST IS NOW COMPLETED

#zk is set to display max 100 people so it should not affect anything now. Thank you for your patience, we found few bugs that slipped our internal testing and made several improvements to it.

+5 / -0