In recent weeks, the join times and lag on the Bridgewater-Brunel server have 'swung between the sublime and the ridiculous' (= changed between very good and very bad).
Now that we have good performance, I am very keen that we keep it and reflect on how things got so bad for so long. It seems to me that this was partly due to misunderstandings: it was not adequately recognized that memory bandwidth and usage had become the main performance bottleneck. And it was partly because James and other coders have been adding new features on a regular basis, which is a really great problem to have!
But at the moment, the
high-level design goals of the project make no reference to performance. I think that is a mistake, because poor performance means many, maybe all, of the benefits listed in that document become unattainable and unappreciated.
I propose that it should be not only a design goal, but a design rule, that the game should be coded so that the Bridgewater-Brunel game never exceeds ~7.5GiB, so that it never goes into swap space. This is a measurable, achievable design goal that brings
immediate and obvious benefits.
I can think of three objections to this change.
Firstly, it is rude of a non-coder to impose burdens and limits on the coders who generously give their time and energy to the project. There is a lot of truth in that, but this is only a proposal; it will be up to coders to decide whether you wish to limit yourselves in this way.
Secondly, it is selfish, because I am a Bridgewater-Brunel player and I am limiting the whole community so that I can have fun. That is also a fair point, but I think it should be recognized that B-B is Sim-Ex pushed to its performance limits. If B-B has poor performance, then the experience of other players is likely to be even worse, either because their large/compex maps are unplayable or because their map sizes and complexity are limited.
Thirdly, that it it is wrong in principle to base the general development of Sim-Ex on a single server. This is a good point in theory, but I think it falls down in practice for three reasons. As mentioned above, B-B is very demanding in terms of memory bandwidth and usage. For a long time I only used single-player mode, mainly for personal reasons, but partly because B-B's memory requirements were unaffordable. So it is a good test of the principal bottleneck. In addition, B-B is by far the most active multiplayer game on the listserver. Maybe there is a hidden community of Sim-Ex multiplayers in Japan, but I think it's fair to say that if B-B performance is poor, a large percentage of the active playerbase has problems. Finally, I think that this particular chicken has long since flown the coop (= this argument is not good because we already break it). The most recent and obvious example is that when B-B upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04, the official releases dropped support for almost all other Linux versions. I think (and I said at the time) that it was a sensible use of James' time to upgrade B-B to 20.04. But the system requirements of the whole project were based on the needs of that one server and nothing else. I could give other examples, but I think that one is sufficient.
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