SEIV , CPU Usage and SEV

[tesco samoa]

One thing i cannot stand about seiv is its cpu usage.

To do a 3 meg turn takes an hour on a 2+ gig machine at 99%

This really needs to be addressed for SEV.

Has anyone who talks to MM actually mentioned this problem to him ?

[Suicide Junkie]

The committee game takes only 60 seconds on my 1-gig, and its in the 1 meg range.

[Arkcon]

Wha-wha-what? SE4 never uses that much of the cpu on my system. It gets slow, when processing the turns of many A.I.'s in the late game, but I hadn't seen that kind of CPU usage. But I've only checked a few times, to be honest.

[Imperial]

Whatever the root issue is-- it takes a long time for the AI players to process their turns-- and it should really be addressed for SE-IV

[Colonel]

Funny this never happened to me on my old computer and it was a big piece. The most it ever took on my computer was 10mins on turn 800 and all the AIs and I had hundreds of ships.

[geoschmo]

Arkcon said:
Wha-wha-what? SE4 never uses that much of the cpu on my system. It gets slow, when processing the turns of many A.I.'s in the late game, but I hadn't seen that kind of CPU usage. But I've only checked a few times, to be honest.

I don't think Tesco is so much complaining that it uses 99% of the CPU. What I've found watching turns run is it will pretty much use whatever processor percentage is available to it. If I am not running any other applications it will use 99%, even for a quick turn. If you aren't seeing it use 99% you probbaly just have other stuff running in the background. The complaint he's got is that even when he's not running any other apps and Se4.exe has 99% of processor resources available to it, it still takes a long time to process the turn.

[AMF]

Geo et al,

I'm a bit concerned about this for entirely selfish reasons. I have the Zeta 2 game starting, which is 250 or so systems, and will likely be rather large. It depends, of course, on the number of people who join, but does PBW really find such games, at the latter stages, to be too big for it to handle? Or is it just a special case with the Return to Hell 2 game? In sum, I guess I am asking, are there specific tech spec limitations on PBW games, and if so, what are they?

Thanks!

Alarik

[geoschmo]

I wouldn't say it's a common occurance, but it's definetly not unheard of. There isn't a list of specifications, but anything that makes a game more complicated and take longer to process in the later turns can be a problem.

The issue is that PBW will timeout after 20 minutes of processing a turn. This is what the PBW code was specifically written to do, it's not a bug or anything. The assumption was that turns that take longer than that had frozen up and stopped processing. Early on there were some bugs that would cause that to happen. So the 20 minute timeout was written in to keep a game from tying up the server and making it unable to process any other games.

Most of the games now that hit that timeout aren't actually locked up, just so complicated they take more than that to run. You can download the turn files and .plr files and process those turns offline though. And then upload the resulting turn back to PBW and it will notify the players of the new turn. PBW still helps in these cases as a turn distribution and collection, it just doesn't actually process the turn so there is a little more work involved for the game owner.

Geoschmo

[tesco samoa]

fyron. the settings do not matter. what matters is that the game is a process hog and will hang a system until the turn is complete. This is an issue with the low level coding of the game. It needs to be addressed for SEV.

[Ragnarok]

Does anyone have a link to Ruatha's PHP script he made for his backup PBW site? I think if I had access to that I could use it to run the RTH2 game and hopefully keep the game going on auto...