[1.23] Solar Panels Causes Massive Lag to All Clients in the Daytime on SMP/SSP. (Shuttering)

Kane Hart · Oct 27th 2011

Now this bug really should only effect SSP but it seems to effect SMP so now the good news its probably not a calculation bug but rather a rendering bug. I tested sound on and off as some bugs are brought on by sound effects even though their is no sound on Solar panels I wanted to make sure.

This game really kills large uses of solar panels even more if your running SMP Server with large community projects and outposts.

Pictures:

Daytime:

Night:

For people with large amounts of solar panels could you please check time and night and hit f3 and let us know here if your also experiencing these issues.

Alblaka · Oct 27th 2011

Hmmm, highly interesting.
Assuming you took those graphs on day/night on the same potion under same conditions (players online, machines (not) running, etc), your guess at a Rendering issue isn't entirely off.
If it only appears on SMP-Mode, it's most likely some networking issue, causing some sort of useless spiky calculation on the client. Most likely rendering or something similar.

We will have a look into this, thanks for the report.

Kane Hart · Oct 27th 2011

Quote from Alblaka

Hmmm, highly interesting.
Assuming you took those graphs on day/night on the same potion under same conditions (players online, machines (not) running, etc), your guess at a Rendering issue isn't entirely off.
If it only appears on SMP-Mode, it's most likely some networking issue, causing some sort of useless spiky calculation on the client. Most likely rendering or something similar.

We will have a look into this, thanks for the report.

This is correct. I stood still while doing this. I have a lot of experience sort debugging though I can't program go figure lol. The issue happens the same over lan and wan the performance is almost identical and yes 1.15 also had the issue.

VariousArtist · Oct 27th 2011

What you see is not lag (from latency) but client side rendering issues. You should try if you see a difference when you turn smooth lighting and adv. openGL on and off - Im 95% sure that this is related to Mojangs new light rendering in 1.8.x and not IC! The more structures players build on the surface the more troubles Mojangs new code gets into. Does not happen always but often!
The difference in day and night would be easy to explain when the bug is in the raytracing code Mojang utilizes.
We have invested a nice amount of time to trace that issues down on our servers.

Alblaka · Oct 27th 2011

Quote from VariousArtist

What you see is not lag (from latency) but client side rendering issues. You should try if you see a difference when you turn smooth lighting and adv. openGL on and off - Im 95% sure that this is related to Mojangs new light rendering in 1.8.x and not IC! The more structures players build on the surface the more troubles Mojangs new code gets into. Does not happen always but often!
The difference in day and night would be easy to explain when the bug is in the raytracing code Mojang utilizes.
We have invested a nice amount of time to trace that issues down on our servers.

In this case replacing the solar panels with stone should'nt influence the lags, as both blocks behave identical when it comes to light-influence.
Would be worth a try to pinpoint the cause of that error.

Gorni · Oct 27th 2011

Just a bit to this thing: We have ppl with a few thousand solars on the server. If they log in and it's day, the server speed drops significantly. As well as i can also see those spikes near a lot of solars.
(but never tested with removing them and testing again.

RawCode · Oct 27th 2011

it will lag with any type of TE object if it placed in such amounts...

this game not really able to handle such amount of TE, every TE run it's code 20 times per second, solars will check every block above every second, 100 solars on 64th level will perform 6400 checks per second and run it's code 128000 times, moreover they also update every cable every second on net.update callbacks.

basically this mod need option to disable renewable energy sources, SMP end with everyone spam solars.

Alblaka · Oct 27th 2011

Solars check every x frames, the last time i checked it was 128-ish

But je, if one places 128000 solars, we're on the same spot again.
A config to disable specific generators is a fine idea. Could cause people to start fighting for fuel & uran

Kane Hart · Oct 27th 2011

Yeah I would not blame that this is a engine not mad to handle 1000's of solar panels. Clearly this is a error of some kind since its causing client lag to a block that really has no need to update the client with 0 information. Yet the client is shuttering. Also just to let you know I test pretty much everything related to it last night and changing settings, texture packs, clean install, 1.15 and 1.23 still has same effects.

Since I don't own enough machines of other kinds I do feel if you were to have 1000 generators or other machines running you might experience the same issue. But again you should not since this client side and it has no need to do really any special calculations but its almost like it is anyways because a piece of code was left in.

Anyways its time for people to stop saying it can't handle it and look for solutions rather then giving up. IC still young and has a long way to go

nallar · Oct 28th 2011

Quote from Alblaka

Solars check every x frames, the last time i checked it was 128-ish

But je, if one places 128000 solars, we're on the same spot again.
A config to disable specific generators is a fine idea. Could cause people to start fighting for fuel & uran

Could you not just optimise further?

(eg, give the explanation of solars having internal storage, and make them output HV every 512 ticks, and make this a config option? :D)

edit: Or make a solar 9x the cost of a solar which is good as 10 solars?

Player · Oct 28th 2011

Send me a PM with server IP + mostly affected coordinates please, my ign is sfPlayer1. I need to debug this myself.

Kane Hart · Oct 29th 2011

Beat Player to this since hes sleeping. Fixed in the next update

nallar · Oct 29th 2011

Does it cause server-side issues? If so, it'd be really nice of you to give the server-side fix to xkillerbees. (And all teh players woul dbe happy too :D)

Share