FalconFour Posted:

Image attacks, any attacks, they’re all the same. The problem is in the time it takes to process the AJAX request and receive a result from the server-side processing of damage, pwnage level, stats, etc… all that **** is processed on the server on each action. Unlike a traditional website, only small portions of the page are sent and received, but the server still does the processing on nearly every action during a “battle”.

Maybe, for some freakish and unusual reason, you’ve never seen the “greyed out lockup” after performing an action with the “pinwheel” spinning and waiting for a response. And I also imagine you’ve never seen the “An error occurred while communicating with the Forumwarz server – try refreshing the page” (paraphrased from memory) message that happens when a request times out.

And yes, the lag is pretty damn bad at times. It makes speedrunning damn near impossible. It’s not a problem with my computer either – it was on my original 866MHz P3 laptop that I originally played Forumwarz on, but not so much on the Core Duo laptop I use now.

I imagine there is much room for improvement. MySQL (which Trout says that Forumwarz uses) has a rather useful “Memory” table type that can be used for temporary tables that are rapidly written, and could help relieve some of the load, if it’s not already being used here in some way. Apache (especially under Linux) makes administration pretty “blind”, but you can probably find some pretty slick tools to show you where the bottleneck is. And as one user had already mentioned, there are people that can help pick better hardware or make better use of it… I’m all for one-server solutions (they’re far more efficient at processing data), and I imagine one server can continue to do everything, just with a little tweaking. Log in to see images!

OK – you are one huge code dweeb – respect….