Let's talk lag!

[Erik]

I'm by no means a developer for Goonstation, even though i'd love to. I however do know some of the ins and outs of BYOND, and what could be causing some of the lag, i'll try to explain some of the questions raised here.

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Some of you may know that BYOND itself is a single threaded language/engine, that means only one piece of code is being executed at a time If this were not true, you would have to worry a lot more about potential problems in your code. For example, if a spawned block of code like the one in the previous example deletes objects from the world, it could cause trouble if code elsewhere were simultaneously using those objects. If the code attempted to access variables or procedures of deleted objects, it would crash, possibly leaving some important operation half finished.

But what I'm really interested in is why Goonstation lags so very much, even when almost nothing seems to be going on you can expect a lot of lag.

Lag as you like to call it, depends on a lot of things, here are a few examples of things that can cause temporary lag.

• Your own connection towards the server can be a cause of lag.
  • LLJK4 Is hosted in the EU, this will mean that US players will have higher latency towards this server.
    
  • LLJK5 Is hosted in the EU, this will mean that US players will have higher latency towards this server.
    
  • LLJK1 Is hosted in the US, this will mean that EU players will have higher latency towards this server.
    
• Large explosions.
  • During large explosions both atmospherics and lighting needs to process a lot of update, which causes a light strain.
    
  • Items need to be removed, and new ones need to be spawned in, even with pooling this can still cause a light strain.
    
• Large fires.
  • Large fires can cause a strain on the server due to the way atmos works, even with some of the work that Volundr and Tobba have put in there are still ways to completely grind the server to a hold.
    
  • The main reason why atmos is still as-is is because it's a terrible mess to work with, Tobba is however working on new atmos code.
    
• Large chemical reactions.
  • Large chemical reactions that create a lot of items, smoke or foam cause strain on the server
    
  • This is because object creation and deletion is expensive, even with proper pooling, it still causes a mild strain on the server when someone fills a flamethrower with chocolathe.
    
• Anything that creates a large amount of items, objects, or actions within a short amount of time
  • As mentioned above, creating and deleting items is expensive, if you create a lot of smoke, or even chocolathe with a flamethrower you will cause some mild strain on the server, all codebases suffer from this, yes even /tg/ and the others, go try.
    
• Millions of bees, and other critters.
  • Critters, bees, and other critter-like things need to be updated each few ticks, otherwise they'd just sit still, now imagine if you have millions of those sitting around, yeah.. don't order millions of bees because it looks cool, it'll just grind the server to a halt and make coders weep
    

Is it a funding problem, not being able to afford a more premium server?

Once again, i'm not a Developer or Administrator, but as far as i'm aware we're still using the same servers, and hosts we've used in the past, Rick currently hosts #1, Tobba hosts #4 and Wire hosts #5.

I don't have insight in the specs about #1 and #4, but i do know that #5 is running on a pretty beefy server, but keep in mind that this server also hosts the forums, unless this was changed.

presumably because it has the lowest latency in general. However, ping-time will frequently spike.

This is wrong, servers are higher in the list because they have more players, this has nothing to do with latency.