Up to Main Index Up to Journal for March, 2021 JOURNAL FOR SUNDAY 14TH MARCH, 2021 ______________________________________________________________________________ SUBJECT: 50,000+ bots, server a little crunchy but stable… DATE: Sun 14 Mar 20:18:44 GMT 2021 This is an excerpt from the server log with 51,200 bots, plus myself, logged into WolfMUD and causing mischief :D U[1Gb +10Mb] A[+39464183] O[ 5551842 +289453] T[51473 +0] G[102429 +0] U[1Gb +62Mb] A[+45191308] O[ 8733152 +3181310] T[51473 +0] G[102429 +0] U[1Gb -51Mb] A[+39893282] O[ 5699546 -3033606] T[51473 +0] G[102429 +0] U[1Gb -2Mb] A[+41968834] O[ 5219779 -479767] T[51473 +0] G[102429 +0] U[1Gb +17Mb] A[+41034808] O[ 6151276 +931497] T[51473 +0] G[102429 +0] U[1Gb -21Mb] A[+40275728] O[ 4825332 -1325944] T[51473 +0] G[102429 +0] U[1Gb +135Mb] A[+50823814] O[12243261 +7417929] T[51473 +0] G[102429 +0] U[1Gb -121Mb] A[+31063716] O[ 5123850 -7119411] T[51473 +0] G[102429 +0] This is on my desktop, a quad core i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz with 8Gb RAM, running both the server and botrunner. Hands up, I did make some tweaks. I tuned my network settings a little. More starting locations were added to help reduce the lock congestion when the bots were logging into the server. The botrunner was modified to load bots in batches of 2048 with a 5 second delay to give the crowds time to disperse. Things were still a little crunchy after the first 35,000 bots joined the server - but WolfMUD was still playable. For this hardware, using the stock zones, the maximum number of bots would be around 30,000 to keep the maximum response time to under 3 seconds - but generally much quicker than that. This is what ‘only’ 30,000 bots looks like: U[615Mb -25Mb] A[+35514291] O[3685060 -812575] T[30273 +0] G[60029 +0] U[609Mb -5Mb] A[+36034025] O[3531108 -153952] T[30273 +0] G[60029 +0] U[621Mb +11Mb] A[+36258529] O[3905237 +374129] T[30273 +0] G[60029 +0] U[612Mb -8Mb] A[+36157285] O[3642445 -262792] T[30273 +0] G[60029 +0] U[620Mb +7Mb] A[+35529586] O[3868141 +225696] T[30273 +0] G[60029 +0] The bottle-neck definitely seems to be with the CPU. If I run 25,000 bots from the Raspberry Pi 4 and 25,000 bots from the desktop then the server is much happier. I tried running all 50,000 bots from the Raspberry Pi 4 but I started dropping connections after about 35,000 bots, even after tweaking the network settings. Am I hitting a limit as to what I can expect from a Raspberry Pi? Something I need to look into again when I eventually get the fan and other bits sorted out - still waiting for some items to be back in stock. Needless to say, the new network code will be going into the next release ;) The changes for the networking are now out on the public dev branch. The update includes two other fixes. One fix is for the botrunner, the other is a minor optimisation to the state.AddLock method. Next job, before the release, is to update the documentation for module mode. Now, if only someone could find me 50,000 WolfMUD players… -- Diddymus Up to Main Index Up to Journal for March, 2021