static zones from batchfile

[Damilis]

I want to be the first to e-shake this man's hand. This must be one of the very few threads where the Title is a perfect summary of what's in the post... plus intuitive enough to easily be found in a search. Outstanding!

Rhodan, do you happen to have the cpu & memory footprints for:
-static zone sitting idle
-dynamic zone sitting idle
-static zone with 1-5 players
-dynamic zone with 1-5 players

I personally think it would be good to start collecting the various server's stats so as to get a good feel as to what any specific hardware can handle... at least approximately.

[Rhodan]

Actually, I think I should probably have posted this to the windows server forum since it is a dos batch file...

Now I just have to figure out how to NOT have a dos window open for every zone or, if thats not possible, have the zone not output its debug information to the dos window (it goes like mad with sense-heading checks etc at times).

Although text output is a minor load on the cpu - I can't imagine that 15-20 zones all spamming their individual windows with debug info would have no impact on server performance - particularly if the server isn't the most powerful machine.

Someone else also mentioned that you can use the start_zones table to start static zones but, I think they were confused - start_zones seems to be for something completely different.

[Damilis]

Originally Posted by Rhodan

Now I just have to figure out how to NOT have a dos window open for every zone or, if thats not possible, have the zone not output its debug information to the dos window (it goes like mad with sense-heading checks etc at times).

Maybe try redirecting stderr/stdout to an error log file or something of the like. This is actually something I should try when I get home...

If you are looking to minimize performance hit on spam like that, just minimize the window(s). Data I/O is super fast on any machine <6 years old, its just getting that data down through the video pipeline to your monitor that sucks up time/CPU cycles.

[Rhodan]

Originally Posted by Damilis

Rhodan, do you happen to have the cpu & memory footprints for:
-static zone sitting idle
-dynamic zone sitting idle
-static zone with 1-5 players
-dynamic zone with 1-5 players

I personally think it would be good to start collecting the various server's stats so as to get a good feel as to what any specific hardware can handle... at least approximately.

Well, I haven't really noted specifics but I currently have 20 static zones and 5 dynamic loaded with nobody logged in. Memory usage is miniscule, the pagefile usage is up about 100mb and CPU usage is at 0%.

Once I log in from another machine and hit a static zone, memory usage increases by about 1 meg. CPU load hits 28-33% for about a second then drops down to 0-1% as I load the zone in my client.

I then went down into Runnyeye and made the biggest train I could - no noticeable effect on ram or CPU use but the network traffic runs fairly consistantly at 0.1% (100MB lancard).

I then started up ekarana to see the impact and it seems to use roughly 3MB ram. CPU use spiked up to 2% for about 1/4 second then dropped back to zero.

Oh yes, myserver is a P4 3.4 gig (single core) with 1gig of memory.

I'm thinking you can load a LOT of static zones even on just a 1 gig machine.

[Rhodan]

Oops! Oversight.

the SLEEP command is not included with dos or windows. The one I use came as part of the Windows 2003 server kit - I just installed the kit and it did the rest, including adding to my path for immediate use.

Go to microsoft and just search for sleep.exe - it'll likely show the resource kit page as the very first link.

I would provide a link but microsoft tends to move things around and who knows when MS is going to put out a newer and better kit with sleep.exe it in - searching would show the newer one first I would think.

[sdabbs65]

if you don''twant to dig up that silly sleep command
theres work arounds for it.
Windows XP does not come with such a command, there are tricks to emulate it, such as a 'ping' command trick to emulate the sleep command

For DOS, Windows 95, and Windows 98 machines

Create the following batch file and name it WAIT.BAT.

@CHOICE /T:N,%1% > NUL

Now, in order to wait 10 seconds in a batch file, just call the WAIT.BAT batch file as follows:

CALL WAIT 10

For Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows 2003 machines

You can use the following WAIT.BAT, as the CHOICE command is not included in the default install on Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows 2003:

@ping 127.0.0.1 -n 2 -w 1000 > nul
@ping 127.0.0.1 -n %1% -w 1000> nul

[unknownerrors]

i couldn't find this anywhere either, but for the sake of explore.exe's already mem hogging ways you can drop multi zones into a launcher and only get one window. open your DB with a Gui viewer editer, and find the launcher table add a table here with your new launcher name, then move over to launcher_zones the add in the zones you want your new launcher to handle, format should be
launcher name | short zone name


now that this is all done edit start.bat

@echo off 
start world.exe
echo Waiting for World to finish before starting Zone...
sleep 20
start eqlaunch.exe zones
sleep 60 <!--gives your dynamic zones one minute to start before moving on ----> 
start eqlaunch.exe #*#new launcher name#*#

just replace #*#new launcher name#*# with your launcher's name..