Were you uninformend? Sorry about that. Let me get you "in the loop" for
what's been cooking in the cauldron of B.A.T. ry board for the last couple
of months!


We're now ready to declare the hardware upgrade a success:

- downtime for the transition period was minimal (hours)
- we're employing new technology in running BatMUD (SSD)
- we're faster than ever: there's less game-based lag

I trust most of our players were unaware of the B.A.T. ry plans of buying
new hardware and were taken by surprise by the quick transition. (For the most
alert players, tips were given out on some occasions on the latest
developments - but this wasn't really in any policy of ours.)

The board's decision was actually a rather swift one, when it came down to
the "do or do not" -part. Then again, you can imagine a collegium of the old
and wise (read: those mostly senile), to be honest it was more like tiring
down the old goats and running for it when the others had finally fallen
asleep from the hours of pointless bickering.

We were offered an excellent around 40% off deal on the server hardware (the
board having previously scoffed against upgrading hardware just for the sake
of upgrading hardware, a wise point from Durand) and took it.

We had been debugging the game-lag related problems (missing database indexes,
huge queries, infinite loops, huge writes, slow reads, recurring operations
and otherwise generally bad code) with good success, but we were still
outweighted by a heavy I/O-throughput combined with yet some more challenged
code, resulting in those all too familiar Info: Lag (5 seconds) -type of
messages.

We employed filesystem indexes, made comparisons on different filesystems
(XFS, JFS, ext3fs, Reiser, etc.), but still our Torturer (the PowerEdge 2850
server with PERC4 hardware and a RAID-5 setup) wasn't performing 'enough'.
Alas, it couldn't fit an SSD anyway easily either- and we knew that PERC4
wasn't exactly fast as a RAID-5 performer.

Now if B.A.T. ry (or BatMUD) was a company, we could allocate several 8/5
resources for the task of optimization and "finding bad code", but as you
know, we're not. And while we're not, we also have a number of developers
continuously making new code "their own way", which does result in such kind
of infinite loops as we saw with the look-code only earlier this week.
Usually they only learn the hard way, if even then..

There are also some products that would actually analyze code for you on the
market, but so far we haven't found one that'd actually fit our budgets and
actually work for us. If I recall correctly, we once had a license for one of
those...but that was a long time ago.

So, the new hardware. A Solid State Disk setup to run the random reads (ok,
maybe run the whole game library) from. A RAID-10 to give maximum throughput
out of the new and improved PERC6. Faster memory to give an overall boost.
More CPU cache. A hassle-free 5-year support contract to ensure longevity.

And also, you probably didn't know, but BatMUD's been utilizing different
kinds of virtualization technologies (such as linux vservers) for a couple of
years now. Lately, we've added VMware to the bunch. Talk about a game that
utilizes today's technologies even though it's still somewhat challenged by
a quite much single-threaded approach on the driver-side.


Thank You for taking the time to read this. Some people have been asking on
some word - basically any word on the status. Hope this helps your thirst for
information.


On behalf of B.A.T. ry,
Amarth Shadowstring