The world is Saving... Please wait.

[Blood]

When I entered this server I found that the pause and resume for the world to save was annoying. I know the importance of it and after a few days I was used to it.

With my time in UOSA Im seeing that Derrick (and staff) is making a hell of an effort to keep the server running by the rules of the era and the content of the patches are incredible. So I thought I should throw to the table my idea...

It is possible in UOSA to run the save process in a separate thread so it doesn't interfere with the gameplay? Like UO normally do saves that players don't notice it.


My 2 cents, thanks!

[Derrick]

I would love to do this, or even save each region individually by doing only a partial lock on the world between regions.

This issue with doing this entirely asynchronously is world consistency, it needs to be a snapshot which means there must be some lock on movement of items between segments of the save. Currently there is a single segment, other possibilities may exist though.

If we could get the world saves to be fast enough we could just get rid of the message, but currently we're at approx. 5 million items; saving that much data is 8 or 9 seconds is pretty speedy. The bottleneck on saves is actually hard drive speed, even with write caching enabled on raid 10.

[rouss]

SSD perhaps? quite pricey but ..

[Dagon]

i dont know how it's done or how it's implimented or anything, but i logged into some other server a while back for a couple mins to see what it was all about and it had no-interupted-game-play world saves.. you played right through the save..

so its entirely possible, just dont know how they did it

[Rhaps]

Someone here must work in tech retail or supply, we're all geeks after all, hook up Derrick with some cheap SSDs!

[SJane3384]

Or another CUB! Would help reduce that 5 mil item count.......

[Rammar]

If we could get the world saves to be fast enough we could just get rid of the message, but currently we're at approx. 5 million items; saving that much data is 8 or 9 seconds is pretty speedy. The bottleneck on saves is actually hard drive speed, even with write caching enabled on raid 10.

Why save all the items every time? Would it be possible to do a Full save at server restart, then Incremental saves on "dirty" items throughout the day?

[MatronDeWinter]

How big of a Solid State drive would the server need, and would that work? I could probably get one if it's something reasonable, I know a few distributors of said types of things. I know those things can go into the 10's of thousands though, but I can't imagine our server save being that large?

[rouss]

How big of a Solid State drive would the server need, and would that work? I could probably get one if it's something reasonable, I know a few distributors of said types of things. I know those things can go into the 10's of thousands though, but I can't imagine our server save being that large?

Well, given that max writing speed possibly floats around 40mbytes/sec and we have 7-9 sec saves, our savefile would be theoretically 300-400mb max. But that im not taking into account time taken to pull all the data out of memory, group, parse, etc. So, I believe ssd of 32-64gbs would be more than enough.

[son]

Derrick does not own his own hardware.

[Blood]

If we want to get rid of the pause, save and resume metodology a lot of development to be made. As Derrick mentioned to get a snapshot the whole server must be paused, with that medology UOSA is able to save dirty items, character items, house items, in other words, the whole server items. The other metodoly (asynchronously) allows the server to save items but require a lot of development and implementation, thus time and effort. It all depends on the priorities of Derrick and the importance of how the server is saving.

The pause is usefull in some ways by giving you time to think your next move, lets say for instance when you are trying to escape from a red or getting trapped by trash mobs but not usefull in a tournament fight or if you are the red trying to kill a blue. Eight seconds can decide something or nothing it all depends the situation.

SSD... investing and not solving completely the "problem" is not a solution. Anyways era accuracy didnt had the pauses!! im just kidding

[nightshark]

Server saves do suck, time flies when you're playing and it seems like you're waiting for server saves every 5 minutes. The server has been very stable whenever I have been playing it, would it be possible to maybe increase the time gap between saves? In the whole time I have played here I think I have seen the shard crash once (and that wasn't even a crash, it was a DoS attack).

On OSI we were constantly dealing with roll backs due to shard crashes, it would never be as bad here as it was back when

[MatronDeWinter]

Oh yeah, I didn't even think that Derrick does not own the server.

Well, what are server saves, like every 15 minutes? Maybe that can be toned down some to every 1/2 hour or something?

There has been almost no crashes, and only like 1-2 times I can think of that a revert has been needed since I have been playing here. I don't think a (possible) extra 15 minutes added on to the revert time would have any significance when compared to the many seconds a day that will be saved by decreasing the save frequency.

[rouss]

save the world every 2 hours

[Derrick]

There are every 30 mins now, and people do get Very upset on 20 mins rollbacks.

We can go many months without a crash, and then have a few in a couple days; usually related to patches.

There are some things we can do to significantly reduce save-times, but it's going to take some work; and if doing saves in sections it's critical that we be very careful about maintaining a consistent wolds state, so that we do not introduce any duping exploits.

Saving the whole world every time is slow, but it's Very secure.