Cleaning-up Operations - Development Log #414

[molp]

Michi talks about the recent server instability and how the team tries to solve it.

You can find the full issue of the development log here.

[lowstrife]

Reminds me of this post when some changes were made which increased the # of operations to the server hardware

Release Notes - Maintenance 2022.02

Side thought here: With the coming changes to notifications, and the ability to disable production notifications… I don’t know how many IOPS to the database production orders cause relative to the entire game. It’s probably a lot, and I would expect this number to go up potentially by as much as an order of magnitude. Most people run huge production orders to cut down on notifications. I personally commonly target an overall time in the 2-4 day range, with quantities of 5-20x. But - now that w…

But - now that we’ll be able to disable them, I expect most people will revert to small production runs. This means a TON more writes to the database compared to what we’re seeing now. I personally plan on running minimum production order sizes to make my logistics more consistent.

More production orders = more accounting transactions (taxes must be paid on every single one), etc, etc. It seems that has continued to grow over time.

How much of this accounting overhead is made up of production orders? I wonder if there is optimization which could be made here by batching the taxes paid to the government over time, especially considering the government only actually gets paid once per week (but taxes are collected instantly).

[molp]

@lowstrife

How much of this accounting overhead is made up of production orders? I wonder if there is optimization which could be made here by batching the taxes paid to the government over time, especially considering the government only actually gets paid once per week (but taxes are collected instantly).

We didn’t analyze how much weight the production orders have, but I imagine it to be significant. The bookings are not only created when an outside transaction happens (ie payment of taxes to another entity) but also internally. For example: when a production order starts we have a booking that reduces the cash account and increases the production fee account. If we would batch these, players won’t be able to see the changes made by the production order start immediately, but only when the batch is done. That’s something we won’t do.

[shagie]

Could you have a daily per user per planet bucket that gets individual transactions for the day and then pays out to the planet as a batch?

Noteing that I’m not even that major of a producer, but that’s a bunch of small items that aren’t as helpful.

Consider:

Production Fees
Planet    | Amount
----------+--------
YI-715c   | 314.15
XG-326d   |   0.00
QQ-001b   | 752.60

And then when the 24 hour event for the planet happens, that fee gets written as one chunk into the FIN report. The account would also be written out in the event of a COLIQ or the CM is demolished on that planet.

If one wants to see the day’s history (or a period of time that is retained), this could be pulled up with FINPA YI-715c which would show the individual transactions (and possibly even some more detail about which production line or item is getting that fee).

Recent cash transactions
---------------------------------------------------
Production fee - YI-715c | 1 hour ago  | 314.15 NCC
Warehouse storage fee    | 2 hours ago | 200.00 NCC

This way, all of my Verdant fees are collapsed into a single line item (which is more useful for reading, and it reduces the number of rows that a single base occupies in the database.

It would potentially also reduce the number of updates that happen to the governor’s CORPFIN screen.