Poweruser
commented
9 years ago A new thread that (partially) takes care of the packet exchange is plausible. What I currently have in mind:
- Incoming packets will still be processed by the main thread after all worlds have been ticked
- Sending of queued packets will be done by the new thread
- When the main thread is busy with something, and no packets have been sent of a longer period, then the new thread starts sending keep-alive packets, to keep the clients connected
On further world content threading:
- Having the entities and tile-entities of each world on a separate thread already brings enough trouble with it: It restricts some things that you could previously do within the entity/tile-entity related event handlers of plugins, specifically modifying another world, than the one that did the event call. I warned about that in issue #2
- The next big change there will probably move the ticking of blocks from the main thread (yes, that is still done there) to the individual world threads. A requirement for this is thread safety of the block classes, as there is only one object for each block type for the entire server. There may even be already issues because of this, as entities do require information about blocks once in a while too, and currently block ticking can happen concurrently to entity ticking.
I don't want to go further than this for now, at least not before doing some extensive profiling again in order to figure out what parts take too much time. Letting multiple threads do the entity ticks of one world was actually the first thing I had tried at the very beginning, after identifying entities as the most time consuming part. I failed so miserably, all kinds of weird things started to happen. But of course, I didn't have the insight in the server code, like I do now, back then. Giving each world it's own thread was the second try, and I'm so far quite happy with it
Zilacon
I have noticed A LOT that when the world thread is overloaded like from world editing it will kick everyone off the server for "Timed Out" when i used MCPC it did this too but when i used TickThreading which separated the network thread on its own independent thread it never happened again. I could world edit a whole world in and no one would get kicked.
Also adding a config option to control the amount of threads on the server would be a great addition, TickThreading had a config option that let you choose the maximum amount of threads.
Like: Bukkit.,yml multithreading: Spawn: worldtick: 3 (Thread for world generation, chunk loading, growth, etc) playertick: 1 (Thread for player movement, location, etc) blocktick: 1 (Thread for block place, break, etc) entity: 2 (Thread for entities) tileentity: 1 (Thread for tile entities) linked: 1 (Thread that helps processing everything.)
This way people can customize the non-busy worlds to run on 1 thread if they want (by setting everything to 0 but the linked thread to 1) or set the threads higher for busy worlds.
Just an idea.