May - June Optimizations

[Telanir 6975]

Greetings denizens of the Fringe,


The Technical Team has been investigating a series of issues that were raised by the community approximately a week and a half ago most vocally. We hope that you will be noticing an improvement in your gameplay now as we have taken several steps to improve your experience.

TL;DR for those who don’t want to go into the details:

• The server responsiveness will be faster.
• We are investigating an occasional lag-spike that causes disconnects.
• We will toss MPM back on since our optimizations should account for the lag it caused.

Firstly, I’d like to touch on what we believe to be the most prominent problem. Given our access to server statistics we could see that several things were practically unaffected on our server, and could not be blamed for any delay in-game. CPU usage rarely clocked in above 30%, RAM usage could peak at around 50% until a restart (after our optimizations now rarely goes over 25%), and our network bandwidth was typically around 1/10th of max usage at peak times. There is an exception however, and we realize that there is still an occasional lag-spike that occurs around every half-hour, I currently believe it is the result of a plugin choosing to save everything at once, and is still under investigation.

Now, lag increased phenomenally when we introduced anti-DDOS servers into the foray, because of constant attacks on our server our consistency on being operational was at heavy risk. We had many reasons to believe that we were under consistent DDOS attacks, and in fact our statistics reveal we receive an average of around 1-2 DDOS attacks per day, mostly mild, yet without our protection we’d be dead. Essentially, information sent from players had to be sent to a DDOS server somewhere far in the world, which would then send information to the server. The server would return the information through the DDOS server like a proxy, and you’d receive your information two times slower, therefore responding twice as slow.
 

Graph explanation: The simplest of exchanges between our anti-DDOS server and main server have been reduced by a factor of >10. Since in a moment these packet exchanges happen many times, the end result is often compounded to 100ms difference or more. By removing that, far less than 100ms compounded, more like 5-10ms. :)

 

Tythus has renegotiated our anti-DDOS servers into the same network that our main server operates in, therefore the ping between the two is about 0.127ms. That’s about one ten-thousandth of a second as opposed to our old 10-20ms ping difference (1/100 to 2/100 of a full second). This means, that the doubled travel time of your information you send will return to normal essentially, and instead of taking 500ms to get your message across, it’ll take 250ms! Yay! (In theory, in practice we just noticed a 100-200ms lower ping on average. Still a good result, MPM can come back in this kind of weather).

Sporadic has spent a lot of time scratching his head over the lag and fixed up a lot of memory-leaks and other potential problems. Meanwhile, we are also fixing up our plugins to be more efficient with our long-built experience.

DISCLAIMER: For those living in Australia, it should be better, but I won’t give you guys any guarantees. Our server is based in the USA, and as much as we’d like to move the server to Australia, or move Australia closer to our servers we can’t really do that. Oh, this includes Eurasia as well.

 

DISCLAIMER #2: Those with bad internet service providers (*cough* verizon *cough*) will still suffer from lag. I truly sympathize with you my friends. ;-;

[Daisy 9732]

The Grand Kingdom of Urguan Approves

 

[Aislin 4354]

your graph is literally impossible to read

[Elad™ 560]

first?

third

[Telanir 6975]

your graph is literally impossible to read

 

Fixed.

 

Just another note, we'll probably be removing wolves at some point as well or restricting their breeding at least, they cause more lag than they're worth. ^-^

[Tythus 1307]

Should be fixed now

[Gone 869]

Ty Tech Team!
You all rock and we love you.

[bickando 3967]

i know ur trying to confuse us with your big coder words and lingo

[DrakeHaze. 2524]

RIP pvp, inb4 midgets with no legs, furries and dragon people.

[GodEmperorFlam 3447]

 

• We will toss MPM back on since our optimizations should account for the lag it caused.
• We will toss MPM back on since our optimizations should account for the 
• We will toss MPM back on since our 
• We will toss MPM back on since
• We will toss MPM back on

 

 

VICTORY!

[Valon (Yokey) 168]

Ah, yes yes. Also, as a member of the tech team, I'd like to say we've umm...upped our RAM ping by 350DDOS ms per server, and we've ummm....optimized the ah....yeah.

[Dyrr 137]

Mpm is love... mpm is life.

[Fimlin 1997]

DISCLAIMER #2: Those with bad internet service providers (*cough* verizon *cough*) will still suffer from lag. I truly sympathize with you my friends. ;-;

*has a lot better internet then he did last year, with comcast/xfinity/bullshit.

[monkeypoacher 8055]

how the **** does anyone receive 1-2 Distributed Denial of Service attacks in a day.

 

Who has botnets to waste clawing at one specific Minecraft server? There aren't enough people simply roaming around attempting to take down random Minecraft servers for it to be different people each time, so why do we not take measures to identify the attacker and make the local authorities deal with them...?

 

Unless you're simply using "DDoS" as a catchall for things like mere Denial of Service attacks, in which I'm sorry for being nitpicky but stop that.

[Telanir 6975]

how the **** does anyone receive 1-2 Distributed Denial of Service attacks in a day.

 

Who has botnets to waste clawing at one specific Minecraft server? There aren't enough people simply roaming around attempting to take down random Minecraft servers for it to be different people each time, so why do we not take measures to identify the attacker and make the local authorities deal with them...?

 

Unless you're simply using "DDoS" as a catchall for things like mere Denial of Service attacks, in which I'm sorry for being nitpicky but stop that.

 

If I was capable at hacking back the DDOS'ers I probably would have done it but that's a hella risky business. I code plugins Charoodler, not waste my time dealing with DDOS attacks rofl, that's what our anti-DDOS servers are for.

 

Want to know the answer to your question? Yeah, I want an answer to that one too. But in general whoever has like a few hundred bucks lying around and doesn't like a ban or a decision or w/e, is capable of attacking us with. Without protection, even those random junk machines given enough time or numbers can bring anything down.