Update [Server]: 11/July/2014

[TinyBigJacko]

Minor tweaks, mostly.

1 - new intro music

2 - admin tool fix - suppress spare maps being created

3 - civilian admins now have access to wanted list (to spot RDMers/VDMers more easily)

4 - first step towards new AL3.1.3 item handling - doesn't yet fix guns disappearing from vests or scopes disappearing from weapons in backpacks, but may solve some other item issues. More to follow.

 

[Christymax]

New intro music?

But all i want to do is ...

and take your money

 

[Grimnir]

"3 - civilian admins now have access to wanted list (to spot RDMers/VDMers more easily)"

Nice! Keep up the nice work admin dude! Kavala is gonna be a bit safer for us scrubs now.

 

[Ghillie pT]

Is your  neighbors house still on fire

 

[Neo]

will we be changing to exDB? I've heard fantastic stories on performance.

 

[Wilco]

will we be changing to exDB? I've heard fantastic stories on performance.

Its very new and we like very stable environments here which is a complete must for a community our size, We will no doubt test it at some point.

 

[Neo]

Totally understand that.

 

[TinyBigJacko]

I am currently running a build of AL 3.1.4 on the (passworded) development server, which uses extDB for its database core.

With all due respect to its author, it is a *very* new piece of code, and it is (imho) far too early to make solid calls about its reliability and robustness. We'll really need to thrash it under load to see whether it meets our needs - I have heard a few reports about it caving in on 80 player servers, but that may of course be down to something else entirely.

However, extDB uses the POCO C++ library to actually do the pipeline work to MySQL, and (according to the docs posted by extDB's author) it has problems using 'LONGTEXT' fields in MySQL. These are 'Binary Large Objects' (aka BLOBs), and are very different from the usual recordset fields that most database engines handle - they can be massive (to varying degrees) and POCO allocates memory on the basis of the maximum possible size of the BLOB field, each time it reads in a line from the database. 

Now, in normal circumstances, this shouldn't matter - most DB reading is done at player-join time (or respawn) and only the once - so even though Tonic's original Altis Life DB schema uses quite a few 'TEXT' fields (which is a slightly smaller BLOB object than the aforementioned LONGTEXT one), it shouldn't matter too much, or cause much memory starvation.

However, with 3.1.4 comes the new feature of HOUSING in-game... and this is likely to involve quite a lot of database reading and writing, in real time, during the whole game session, as people's houses are locked, unlocked, filled with stuff, and emptied, etc. The Housing database tables use 'TEXT' fields too, and I am a little bit worried that they might - if affected by the POCO limitation - cause us problems when the server is at max capacity. We shall see. Certainly, though, it is under investigation, and already working, even if it is not load-tested yet, to our satisfaction.

It's also worth bearing in mind that I rewrote Tonic's original synchronous use of the ARMA2NETMYSQL plugin, (which extDB is intended to replace) so that it was fully asynchronous, a couple of months ago. The original method crapped out repeatedly when the server reached about 60+ players, and we were getting constant reports of write-fails (perceived as rollbacks, but in truth, it was merely that players' data never even left our gameserver for the database server). Since the rewrite, these complaints have dropped to virtually nil (we still get one or two every few weeks, but I am confident these are usually client side, or to do with character-filtering that Tonic put in place on the db calls, for reasons I don't fully understand).

So, even though the initial reports on extDB are good, I don't intend to change our frontline 3.1.2 server to it immediately. But if all goes well in testing, when I roll out our customised 3.1.4 server (with our homegrowns embedded in it), we'll probably be using extDB at that point.

Hope that helps.

 

[Price___]

All I got out of that was housing, the phrase Christmas came early doesn't even come close

 

[TinyBigJacko]

Translation for Price:

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, BUYABLE PLAYER HOUSING, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, MEDICS REVIVING WOUNDED, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, SECRET ARMY STUFF, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, GANG SHARED MONEY AND BASES, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, BIGGER, BETTER, MORE.

 

[Price___]

Sounds about right

 

[Neo]

lol, Yeah, I've looked into housing previously, I've seen servers running it, however I've seen more servers reverting due to issues caused by this. In no way should a rush be made. Somewhere to store my crap when I log off would be nice, but the initial speed changes are what's been intriguing. 

Nice to know the Altislive.co.uk dev server is testing on this, when things are more worked out, I'm sure a lot of teamspeak groups would love to do a load test for you.

It's also worth bearing in mind that I rewrote Tonic's original synchronous use of the ARMA2NETMYSQL plugin, (which extDB is intended to replace) so that it was fully asynchronous, a couple of months ago.

Didn't know that, but I'm glad to know such avid developers are working on the back scene, Thanks for the info/updates