World saves... Please not in the face...

[Faust]

The problem with extending world saves isn't necessarily just based on lost data in the case of a server crash. RunUO has constructed a lot of their code around world saves, unfortunately. For example, decaying items in the world...

Decaying items only disappear during a world save since the code is constructed around it that way. It's much easier and less stressful on the server to simply apply a datestamp to an item and check during the save if it's ready to decay. However, if you were to add an individual timer to every single item to set it up for decay it would be a huge increase to server activity.

Would have been nice if RunUO actually constructed a better saving mechanism than what is put in place right now in all honesty.

[Dagon]

Would it be possible or practical then, if removing/extending saves were ever actually going to be considered, to -- in some variation of this thought -- disable the actual save mechanism during the world save but keep the item decay/et all stuff running normally, and include a new counter that ticks up each time the non-save happens, so once it reached a certain value the real save would occur and the counter would reset again for the next real-save.

[Sum_Mors]

Discussion on a way around item decay aside, the big question: What is era accurate?

While people whine about losing progress, I can remember plenty of stories the other way around.

"I had lost everything! Some mean PKs came and looted my house and held me down and had their way with me, and a server crash saved it all!"

[Faust]

Would it be possible or practical then, if removing/extending saves were ever actually going to be considered, to -- in some variation of this thought -- disable the actual save mechanism during the world save but keep the item decay/et all stuff running normally, and include a new counter that ticks up each time the non-save happens, so once it reached a certain value the real save would occur and the counter would reset again for the next real-save.

Honestly, the best approach in my opinon would be to apply a decay routine that is called by the latest globalized tick based timer that was implemented here a few months back. The decay would be checked during every tick and alleviate it from world saves. In fact, nothing should be attached to a world save.

[Derrick]

We don't actually currently depend on world saves for item decay, see newbie house deeds decaying in 20 seconds. We do take advantage of the world save to decay more slowly decaying items, but it's not necessary.

As far as server crashes, they are very infrequent, but when we do have a problem we can have a few crashes in a day, this usually happens coincidentally with a big patch; no matter how much testing we do, the real testing happens on patch day.

Our minimum save frequency should two hours, as that's the schedule we use for doing off-site backups. I think that we could probably find a way to speed up saves some more so that they can be more transparent. Right now we are saving over 5 million items and 200k+ mobiles in under 10 seconds, which is pretty good, but there is still room for more optimization. A lot of work has been done on reducing save times, but I may be able to squeeze some more out of it.