What would it take to cut down the world saves?

[Hemperor]

Pretty sure Derrick has gutted pretty close to everything that can be from RunUO that isn't necessary to be saved and that in of itself is a long, tedious process.

I think the only thing that can be done is progressive saving, eliminating world saves as a whole.

Just trying to recount from memory conversations with D a while ago, he could clarify, but other than changing saving as a whole (which I would assume is not a priority) I highly doubt anything can be done to significantly minimise them.

EDIT: So I guess you (us ) should donate anyways as Derrick has already done what you requested Also I'm sure the server costs a lot to run and it's essentially Derrick's 2nd (unpaid) job.

[Ronk]

Ill admit I have little knowledge on the back end of Run UO. I did some very basic scripting in the past and ive looked around a little but thats about it. So my 'idea's are merely hypothetical and based off my knowledge and experience with database saving and such.

It certainly is interesting though :-p Do we know, did OSI servers use a progressive save? I know there were reverts on UO after server down...a lot of people would always pull out good gear and do crazy things before a server down. But you never saw "Please wait while it saves"

Perhaps OSI was some sort of multi-thread thing? Where it could quickly dump everything it needed to a seperate spot of ram and then continue the server while backing all of the data up in a seperate thread?

I know also, OSI's world was broken into smaller chunks but they also had a ton more of people....so im not sure thats the issue.

[Brules]

Kelektra, you are missing the fact that as of Jan 2010 when I started here, item count was 1.8-1.9million. It is now (1.4 years) 6.2+ million. I would say that is a precipitous increase that is showing no signs of decreasing.....

[nightshark]

It certainly is interesting though :-p Do we know, did OSI servers use a progressive save? I know there were reverts on UO after server down...a lot of people would always pull out good gear and do crazy things before a server down. But you never saw "Please wait while it saves"

OSI saved as it went, but it did not constantly save. There would often be 1-2 hour reverts on the shard I played if the shard crashed. I played Revelations for about a week (shard made by the creators of RunUO), they had progressive saves on that shard too. Every 15 minutes there would be a message "shard is saving, you may experience some lag", but it was unnoticable.

[Stuck]

I have thought about this and tried to research the Run UO code but didn't get very far before I got side tracked.

What I was curious is whether the following was/is possible:

Basically, give every house container (box, crate, bag, etc) a 'modified' flag. If anyone opens this box...or get more complex and say if anyone adds to/moves in/removes from the box the modified flag is set. Otherwise, it stays unset.

At world save, anything unmodified is not overwritten and not saved. The idea being, its already saved and there is no need to save it again. My guess is the large majority of 'stashes' are rarely touched and if something like this could be implemented (assuming its possible and not already) then it should reduce save times.

The flag check and time comparisons it would have to perform on every single item during a save would probably increase world save times.

The bigger problem is that the server has to load these huge hoards of items into memory when they're not being used, and that slows down everything, not just world saves. If it could avoid loading these items into memory in the first place, that could solve the problem, but it could also introduce new ones and complicate things.

[Tayness]

well I for one think that in comparison to other shards the world saves here are VERY short and undisturbing. I find it nice that we get the little warning "world will save in X seconds" or what ever. I might also add that on this server I do NOT experience the lagg and such all that often. Granted I am here more permantly now than before and my participation on here over last year a bit sporadic but I seen and improvement in my performance. Just thought I would share that.

[KublaiKhan]

Clean up brittania part 2?