The main issue still unresolved is the occasional freezing of the game. I need to gather as much info about that as possible, because nothing in my log files show what's happening when these freezes occur. I'd like to get a report of when these freezes happen, how long the game is frozen, if it becomes responsive again after a period of time, if the game sends output but doesn't process input, and any other info that might help me track down the cause of this. Maybe some log file output at the time of the freeze to see if there's any pattern to it. I'm trying to determine if it's being caused by the game, TWGS, or the system.

Stab in the Dark:

Maybe it happens when someone presses, from the command prompt: V ...after the hour passes.

Agree with LS..big delay on the V once per hour.

Also get a bit of a delay on daily logs.

If the delays we're talking about are fairly short, and ESPECIALLY if everyone in a game or on the server is experiencing them at the same time, then it probably is related to CPU overload. This version is a debug version with a ton of added overhead, and it's easily a tenth as efficient as the raw release version, maybe less. In addition, the server is shared, and I often see lots of CPU going to other apps. So if it's CPU lag, that's just a reality, and it'll be up to the gameop to make sure TWGS has plenty of CPU and that settings are such that it won't overload with a full house of players. I will look at the V screen to make sure it's not pulling too much CPU. The latest work I've done has been to calibrate pacing in the game so that no single operation can pull more than 5% of CPU (using this server as a benchmark). I don't recall if I addressed the V screen regen, though.

Also, I have occasionally done things on the server that pull a heavy CPU load. Just displaying a game log to console takes 100% CPU (this is a single-CPU system). Running Bigbang used to pull 100% CPU, but I just added a feature where you can specify what percent you want to use. It slows the bang down, but allows your players to play through while you're banging a game. I may do that with Extern as well, if that's a problem, though I tend to think it's better to lock people down during Extern so they can't do anything until it finishes. It was designed to be run while the games were offline, after all.

Ok, so the big question I have is, do these lags effect everyone at the same time? Or is it isolated? If people can post the times when they experience lags, maybe we'll see a pattern. And I'll see about adding some diagnostic code to identify lags and log them.