Topic

Performance

I don't want to beat a horse that you know you're going to kill in a few weeks, so forgive me. But that last test had some performance issues.

It was common for the game to hang for anywhere between a fraction of a second and several seconds. I could not find a perfect correlation between my actions and the hangs. Sometimes they seemed to happen when I passed another character. Other times, they seemed to happen when a bunch of us were working on a street project, gathered under the street vendor that was offering the project.

In any case, the game seemed to ignore (and throw away) keyboard and mouse input for a few seconds and then, when it was ready, rip through a bunch of queued-up inputs in a fraction of a second. Needless to say, this cause my poor character to do all sorts of things that were unintended.

The second performance issue is moving between regions. The "preparing region" screen stays on long enough for me to make tea. Yet there's almost nothing on the region, as measured by pixel content or behavior. I've seen FPSs with *way* more level content load *way* more quickly.

Now sure, I know it's in alpha and all. My concern is that there are hardly any players at the moment. If this is ever going to scale up, the performance needs to be ***way*** better.

I'm not sure if the "lag" issue is a platform issue. If it is, then please, please abandon this platform and find one that isn't a pig waiting to be petted.

So: caching. It's a good thing! And it will almost completely eliminate the delay in moving to a region that you've already seen. If you know that I'm going to place P and have to pass through a sequence of regions to get there, there's no excuse for not caching them ahead of time. Heck, the kind of anticipatory caching that Chrome does for nearby websites could easily be done for nearby regions even if I'm not going to a particular place.

Posted 23 months ago by Plurp Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • I came across this too. Once or twice the street loading issue was explained by a project on that street (or an excess of pigs on another, but that's another story) but many times it was just a normal street with little or no activity on it.
    Posted 23 months ago by bluto Subscriber! | Permalink
  • During this last test, I switched betwen Chrome (my default browser) and IE8 & IE9 many times trying to minimize lag time.

    I agree that the game just seemed to "hang" and lose keyboard, mouse, etc for 5-10 seconds before returning. I couldn't determine why - didn't seem to be browser related or Flash memory footprint related.

    On the other hand, the extermly long delay in the preparing region when moving from street to street was unbearable. It was so bad I found myself trying to figure out what was going on. While I don't know exactly, what I found was that as soon as the browser process that was running Glitch used more than 400 Meg, the performance between streets was unacceptable. I am running under Windows 7 - 64bit.

    Once I realized this it was easy to relate the slow performance when preparing the new region to the large memory use. At that point I would exit the world - answer the three poll questions - and watch all that memory free up. Then I would simply click on enter the world and moving between streets was back to only 1-3 seconds.

    While I could easily see the memory footprint having an impact when moving from street to street, I could NOT see that it had anything to do with lag while remaining on a single street. I saw the lag on a single street happen with a new browser session as well as a session that had a memory footprint of over 1 Gb.
    Posted 23 months ago by Shadowy Time Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yeah, this was the first time I experienced lag, both on streets and between. I noticed it most on busy streets like the Forest and Meadow's main thoroughfares.
    Posted 23 months ago by MeetHead Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I experienced severe lag while changing from street to street and when a new player entered the street I was on (hence why I was grinding alone on an out-of-the-way street for 12 hours straight, quoo.) And forget about the end of the test Gnome-army party, I was timed out for almost the entire time with so much happening on-screen.

    I still contend that the lag is being caused by the synchronization of all characters to the same objects - everyone gets "tweaked" down to the lowest common speed. In many cases, when I experienced lag, I believe the cause of the lag was myself; even though I have what I consider to be a fairly good connection: www.speedtest.net/result/11...

    15.0 Mbps down and 2.0 Mbps up is respectable, and this is consistent at all times of the day / day of the week. But this is my connection to the backbone in New York on the east coast; my ping time to Washington state or Vancouver rarely goes below 80 ms, and sometimes can exceed 100 ms, and I suspect it may exceed that at times.

    Even though It looks as though Glitch is utilizing amazon's servers for load balancing and distribution, based on my experience, I believe that some resources called for in-game are still housed in Vancouver / West coast. Although I don't know exactly what alpha.glitch.com/help/test/ is measuring, my results seem high, even though they are "in the green:"

    * IP Address: 67.86.134.245
    * JavaScript: Enabled
    * Flash Player: Success (Version 10.1.102)
    * jQuery Loaded: Success
    * CDN 1 Direct: Success (771ms)
    * CDN 2 Direct: Success (635ms)
    * CDN 1 Global: Success (398ms)
    * CDN 2 Global: Success (200ms)
    Posted 23 months ago by Yeoman Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I can't really say anything new that I haven't a dozen times before, but you guys have shared some useful information here, and I don't want to discourage that kind of thing. If you have anything to add to this thread, please do.

    Things we know are laggy right now:

    - Anything at all after a few hours of play when memory usage has crept into the 600-700 mb range
    - Loading new streets (this seems related to the previous issue)
    - Streets with a lot of players on them
    - Streets with a lot of geometry/decorations on them
    - The Rook Egg Smashing quest
    Posted 23 months ago by Beefcake Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Is creeping memory usage a memory leak or just a cache size issue? If the former, I hope it can be found! If the latter, I'm confused about why cache size would be a problem but perhaps it could be reduced? (Sorry about the vague thoughts. I have no idea how the code is organized.)
    Posted 23 months ago by Plurp Subscriber! | Permalink
  • We're pretty sure it's leaking memory, we just haven't had the chance to profile it and give it the attention it needs yet.
    Posted 23 months ago by Beefcake Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Oh good. Then stopping and restarting the client should be a reliable workaround until a fix comes. Thanks!
    Posted 23 months ago by Plurp Subscriber! | Permalink
  • OK - another performance issue! I tried the Rook's Quest again during today's alpha and, again, gave up. I leapt over the first rock, quite sprightly I must say but, as I landed, I was beaten up and sent back to the beginning as if I had landed on the rock. I hadn't, at least not visually. There was a significant delay as I leapt, perhaps as much as a half second in which I was frozen in mid-jump. That might account for my untimely demise.
    Posted 23 months ago by Plurp Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Aaaand I see that you already know about the Rook's Quest lag. :-)
    Posted 23 months ago by Plurp Subscriber! | Permalink