What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

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Festus1965
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What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by Festus1965 » Post

What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

depending on:
* less parameters that might be active ...
* less mods, based on that node, checking if they should ... spawn a mob, grow gras/plant, ...
* sure some others ...

Reason: wanna update my 'afk' area, where gamer can park their avatar to stay in game, but lower the impact on forcing active tasks ...
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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by Wuzzy » Post

Hmmmm, probably air.
Or a dummy node with an empty definition that isn't placed anywhere in the world and not used by any mod ever. :D

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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by pampogokiraly » Post

It's simple. If your game is already running with 0 fps, then no other blocks will affect the lag at all!
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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by Festus1965 » Post

pampogokiraly wrote:
Thu Jul 22, 2021 09:18
It's simple. If your game is already running with 0 fps, then no other blocks will affect the lag at all!
Mhh, you might still not have understood the difference between lag and fps

Even if a server has 20 sec lag, my client can still show me 60 fps ...

But, My afk areas are about 1.000 above the ground,
so no basic biome, green or monsters are effected ...

Until now:
* Frame and floors with glas
* beds (will take trhem out)
* and black wool, for easier reading F10 chat
but I think
* I also should block the view out of the box
* and stay with this non passing view layer then also inside a mapblock, to keep them low as possible
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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by twoelk » Post

indeed you should actually avoid anything transparent of any sort including leaves and such. Anything that blocks the view completly should help. Of course things such as the minimap or radarlike devices should also be avoided just as any block that can have stuff growing on it, might trigger mob activity or use entities to display text. Staying clear of areas any involved mapgen might be interested in should also help.

Maybe built a windowless area with the default:cloud block. That might be the most inactive and least referenced block in mtg. Actually it is so obscure most players don't know it even exists. And did I mention it is rather indestructable.
I wonder if you placed such a cloud-node built box in the most extreme top corner with three sides facing the void wether this would reduce the most of minetest server activity.

not that that would be a space I would want to spend time at or in.

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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by Festus1965 » Post

default:cloud
is not available here even as admin,

but the idea with the upper corner is good, as so I save a lot of not loading and every time repeated check for ABM, LBM, etc. mapblocks also.

guess will test wool, if nothing better comes up.
glass now is working well, but the transparent makes send more mapblock as setting view distance sent blocks
Last edited by Festus1965 on Fri Jul 23, 2021 11:56, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by twoelk » Post

use worldedit; - with great care ofcourse, - as getting rid of missplaced cloud blocks ... - oh well have fun

maptools by calinou made cloud blocks somewhat less difficult to handle by making them breakable with the purple admin pick.

there where some other mods that made them more accesible but can't remember the names

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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by Festus1965 » Post

Festus1965 wrote:
Fri Jul 23, 2021 10:19
... and every time repeated check for ABM, LBM, etc. mapblocks ... .
In the moment editing this part (fill in) I realize it should be possible to

disable some mapblocks from be checked for ... growing (plants), mobs spawn, ABM, LBM etc.

as opposite to the world anchor, what keeps mapblocks loaded for this. hmm
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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by Krock » Post

Ignore at world edges because no more mapblocks are generated beyond that point, resulting in the best performance you could imagine.

Realistically speaking, cubic nodes are fine too, because they can trigger the occlusion culling to stop caring about nearby mapblocks, hence increasing performance a bit.
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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by ShadMOrdre » Post

I can induce lag on a server as a non privileged user simply by putting my view distance to a very high number. Regardless of occlusion culling, a high view distance will cause the engine to then emerge all blocks within a sphere surrounding me.

Even if at the edge of the world, if I set a view distance of 1000, the server will emerge all blocks within 1000 nodes of my position. At the world corner of 31000, 31000, 31000, this would still mean that the server would emerge all blocks back to 30000, 30000, 30000. Setting a higher view distance will cause more and more of the world to emerge, with all the relevant ABMs, LBMs, entities, node timers, and all other code affected by the areas emerged.

World generation can crap out a server for all users during the moments of emerging the relevant blocks.

As such, view distance and world generation should and need to be separated within the engine so that a high view distance does not trigger world gen. At the very least, a settable limit on how many blocks actually get emerged by a user with a high view distance.

Yes, I know there are settings to limit the number of emerged blocks, how many blocks get sent to the client, and other settings affecting this. There is a "disconnect" in the way that all these settings actually work, and fine tuning the group of settings is a hair loosing experience on a good day with good documentation. There isn't any useful documentation regarding how these various settings actually work with each other to place limits, or expand limits, or how they are affected by other settings.

I create, mass emerge, and cycle through worlds repeatedly on any given day, testing code. A view distance of 20m and turning on unlimited distance actually improves performance over a view distance set at 120m, with unlimited distance disabled. The low view distance only emerges the immediate space around me, while a higher setting thus requires emerging an exponentially larger space around me. This is also affected by the direction in which I am looking, emerging more in that direction, while still emerging the sphere around me. The engine predicts my motion to also affect in which direction it should "pre-emerge", and this has undesirable consequences, even in normal game play.

This is true, regardless of the PC used. Builtin graphics or dedicated nVidia with 2GB and I can fly emerge much faster with low view dist and unlimited distance set. I also use a chat command provided by one of my mods that enables me to mass emerge areas of the worldmap. I get different performance levels on Win10 vs Lubuntu18.

General PC performance also plays a GREAT deal in all of this. A super PC, slowed by AV or Windows Update, or any other background processes will always create lag, affect FPS, and otherwise kill a pleasurable experience. Even older PCs, that are tuned well, can sometimes outperform more powerful PCs.

I'm willing to load a profiler, and provide some more concrete data, if anyone is interested in the internals.


Shad

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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by Festus1965 » Post

ShadMOrdre wrote:
Fri Jul 23, 2021 17:03
I can induce lag on a server as a non privileged user simply by putting my view distance to a very high number. Regardless of occlusion culling, a high view distance will cause the engine to then emerge all blocks within a sphere surrounding me.
...
I create, mass emerge, and cycle through worlds repeatedly on any given day, testing code. A view distance of 20m and turning on unlimited distance actually improves performance over a view distance set at 120m, with unlimited distance disabled.
This is new for me, or let me say, can't believe this.

As of my experience, even if I set view distance to 1.000 as did after walking long distance, or a huge area I wanna see from top hill, I ONLY could see this MapBlocks I had loaded by walking there with my activation distance, AND was able to stay in my local Client memory as of my high settings.

And on my server I just also tested this
* take all beds out of afk area (+40)
* took the 8 protection blocks away, now only area active
* set 12 gamer there standing view from 250 down to 30
NO CHANGE - still 0.23 min, to 0.25 lag with 12 gamer

maybe I will see it only with 50 people again, but as of your description, you alone think to lag the server with that high view range ! no, I don't see that
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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by ShadMOrdre » Post

One of the mods I use shows me when a block emerges. This is not default MTG behavior, which never tells you anything about magpen. You won't see it in the debug file either. But rest assured, the world is being emerged around you in every direction to the distance that you have view distance.

The disconnect I referred to is that yes, in my client, even with a very high view distance, whether a chunk is sent to my client, whether my client draw said chunk, and how many can stay loaded, and for how long...... A high view distance does not reflect well in the client, when chunks are loaded only when viewed closely enough depending on other settings, some server side, some client side.

While my view distance may be set rather high, server side settings and client side settings come into play. Just because my view distance is set to 1000m does not mean that my client will draw anything beyond what the client side graphics settings allow, in regards to active blocks in memory.

This is also somewhat less noticeable with the built in mapgens versus Lua mapgens. As a test for yourself, grab a copy of Gael de Sailly's mapgen_rivers mod, over in the WIP section. It is a very well performing Lua mapgen. Because it's in lua versus the engine, it runs slower, and allows you to see nuances in how the settings work together.

Much of what I am relating here is very subtle and nuanced behavior. I usually spend a great deal of time each day repeatedly editing a mapgen setting, creating and loading a world, emerging large parts of or scaled versions of world maps to see the changes made by the code. My emerge_area chat command allows me to generate the world, so that flying around is somewhat more fluid and lag free, versus fly emerging the same area. Even when I've pre-emerged large areas, when I fly around with view distance set high, I still trigger mapgen, since the sphere around me is what emerges. While I pregenerated say (-500,-32,-500) to (500,160,500), if my view distance is set to view outside any of those bounds, mapgen is triggered, even if my client does not draw it, and even if MTG doesn't tell me.

Shad

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Something to try

by SciFurz » Post

I tinkered with settings lately to improve performance on my simple laptop with integrated Intel crapics (not a typo :-p), and what made a biggest difference was setting the three emergequeues to 0.
I also set block_send_optomize_distance to the minimum of 2, and now I can at least run with level 1 speed boots across the map while it is rendered almost fast enough to keep up the whole time without running into the wall of unspawned mapblocks.
This is with a view distance set to 300, unlimited disabled. I tried the 20/unlimited on, but it only rendered the two mapblocks around me.

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Re: What node(s) has the lowest impact on lag ?

by Festus1965 » Post

SciFurz:
the mapgen is not my problem, on my server hardware I can let a gamer fly, no-clip, auto-forward generate new area and there is no stop as of not ready generated

I wanna reduce the lag effect from inside gamer, when they go afk in a special area (guess 2.000 nodes up in the air) to be able to still chat, let there machines run, but not activating nodes around them to cause extra check for mobs to spawn, or similar

as I have some moderator accounts stay in game most time, watch gamer via spectator, see the different chat channels, but don't game at all also ...
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