[CF-Devel] Bug in cvs checkout on 09-Jan-2001?

[Michael Toennies]

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      > The error comes because there is no "bye" or "logout" cmd. The
     
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      server can't
     
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      > determinate the difference between a broken connect or a client
     
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      side closed
     
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      > connect.
     
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       Note that the server reports connections of all types, so even with a bye
     
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      command, you will still see a lot of connects/disconnects
     
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      reported.  Now whether
     
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      this really needs to be logged is a different story - potentially
     
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      not, as even
     
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      'bad' disconnects are not a problem on the server side of things
     
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      but is instead
     
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      on the client.
     
     
Then we should stay with it.


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      > Also, iam not sure that the way i connect direct to the server
     
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      is a good way
     
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      > to
     
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      > get the latency. The idea is of course to get the time the server really
     
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      > need to
     
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      > serve a single user. But when we have many users, the server
     
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      can get dozens
     
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      > of these
     
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      > "ping connects" per seconds. I have no idea about th effects on
     
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      server speed
     
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      > or
     
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      > connections.
     
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       It certainly won't help.  I'm unsure of the actual speed
     
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      concerns - I think
     
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      most of the work is done by the OS, but I'm not sure how costly
     
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      things like the
     
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      accept is.  Certainly, for each active connection, the server has
     
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      to monitor it
     
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      for input, and if it gets input, do that action, but that should be fairly
     
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      trivial unless you get a lot of clients out there, which could
     
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      happen.  That is
     
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      probably the bigger concern, as hundred/thousands of clients
     
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      connecting/disconnecting probably will have performance problems.
     
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       I'm not sure
     
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      how soon that will be an issue.
     
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      > A normal ping will also work, but only show you the connect to the used
     
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      > server,
     
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      > not the real cf speed. And this can change when much user are
     
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      online or the
     
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      > server thread runs with low priority.
     
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       Of course, your current method only shows statistics as when the
     
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      player is
     
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      determining where to log in, correct?  So that data is only valid
     
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      for that time
     
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      being.
     
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       I would guess that the general case is that a server can handle a certain
     
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      number of players/connections adequately, but once it gets beyond
     
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      some number,
     
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      the performance really starts to nosedive (especially if the
     
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      performance issue
     
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      is bandwidth and not say cpu time).
     
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       The problem that even with pings is once again, if there are thousands of
     
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      clients out there sending ping requests, while it doesn't harm the actual
     
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      crossfire server, thousands of pings would start to take up some
     
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      significant
     
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      amount of bandwidth.
     
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       So I can't really come up with a good solution without knowing
     
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      the potential
     
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      user base.  I would guess if the user base gets significantly
     
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      large, even the
     
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      load on the metaserver could start becoming significant.
     
     
Thats also exactly what i think about it.
What are your plans for the linux client?
Will you also do a ping or simply list the metaserver servers?

I find, we should stay set with the server ping, because it its useful
and its works, but we should give him always an eye when the user base
starts growing.

Perhaps one time, we must decide to skip this feature.
Then the problem are the older client versions out there doing it.

The good point of the direct server us ping way is, that we can more easier
change this (for example to change the server port as worst szenario) - if
we
start using real pings we have to shut down the ping cmd for the server to
end it
and thats starts some more problem (at last we not own the server hardware
in most times).