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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

I'm alive!!

I could tell you I had a very bad car accident, maybe that I got into the drugs , got kidnapped or abducted but I really can't say other thing than the truth:

I have not made anything in the project for about two months :(

Got quite frustrated trying to make the project to work the non-blocking way, and in fact I made it to "work" quite easy, I was very happy because I thought I could make the server work faster and use less resources than I was using...

WRONG!, server worked fine with a low load (say less than 50 users), but when I started to add more users it just collapsed with nasty segmentation fault errors, sometimes when a client disconnected it just blocked the server, I didn't had all those problems with the "old" server and I although I tried to debug the code, errors never went away..

But that's not the worst thing, worst think is performance was poor.. I never felt the non-blocking approach was faster, basically because my blocking approach used many, many threads, a good approach if you use a multi-core processor, but the non blocking used only 3-4 threads for everything, with separate functions like accepting new clients, updating player states or sending data, so some threads have little load while other threads couldn't handle the load at all.

What happens when you have problems? usually it starts to appear more like mushrooms (Damn Murphy's law ), and I was just trying to solve other problems that were not related to the blog...
   
And then I let the blog die slowly, but even without posting more blogs many people entered and read it, and today I arrived to 3k visits and I knew I had to do something, like trying to reanimate the zombie-blog.

Then I remembered a comment I got from wise Amit Patel : How many users do I plan to have? maybe the problem is not being able to handle 10k users·

Now I can say I was distracting myself from my biggest objective, actually making the game!!! so I put my hands on the blocking sockets code again and re-started again, it has been hard, but in this week I expect to launch two updates for the game that will make it a little more user friendly and usable..

Thanks for reading and see you soon (promise)