Question to the devs of emulator.
 

If your mission was to cause the largest lag spikes possible on a server what would you do? As a player or a dev.

Sleep(10000) !
...
But seriously. Have you tried profiling code that you suspect?

I would use the bot system, as they are known for infinite loops and lag spikes.

:)

I would ask Akka to host the server. =P ..wait, nevermindit!

Players on Varlyndria: Ascension are reporting that looting is causing lag. What in the world would cause this, as I have never encountered this problem before?

There's a "feature" to log who looted what first, can't recall the name. Turn it off.

Loot Firsts in rules_values, it checks a table to see if the item has ever been discovered before, it is taxing because it queries every single time instead of performing lookups in memory

This has been a problem on PEQ For like a year. I thought we checked that. Will check again to be sure.

It's been a problem on several servers for the last year or more.

Seems like it should default to off.

I would probably put cash drops on all mobs and then make sure players all use /autosplit so that every time they loot a corpse, they do a Save() 6 times (one for each char in the group getting money from the split), which forces a DB write of the Player Profile blob. That would be pretty heavy when doing it for every corpse that gets looted. Not to mention that MakeLootRequestPackets() (which happens when you open a corpse) also does another Save() for the client that is looting.

Then, you got the inventory updates for the items being looted.

Also, if you get the group to have as many pets as possible, I think that may cause some extra DB hits due to the SavePetInfo() function being added in places it probably is not required (such as when purchasing items from a trader NPC).

If setting the Discovered Items rule to false fixes your loot lag issues for good, then I would be a bit surprised, as it is fairly small compared to some of the other hits that happen during looting. I do agree that it should be loaded into memory and handled that way for look-ups vs querying each item that gets looted though.