Okay - so I've read through many of the forum posts - and it seems there are a lot of wonderfully intelligent people in these forums.



Now - I know the idea of getting a "Lag Free" station seems to be a bit of a "Myth" among people - but I figure we can put together some hardware specs with some software/code changes that would help all of us towards creating a lag free environment.



So - let's start hardware - the game, from what I understand, runs off a single core/single thread - I'm assuming, without changing the byond code itself, there is absolutely NO way to force this into a second thread? I mean... ABSOLUTELY NO way??



So basically - you're going to want a computer/server that is fast on a single processor.



Secondly - Ram - I've heard people say it spikes up to 1.5 GB in Ram - getting 8-16GB in a computer/server isn't that difficult - so I think that'll be fine.



HardDrive - I've had some debates over this one - Someone suggested to me once that moving the station to a RAM Disk would be really good - my question is, I wonder how much information does this game transfer/read/write in a single 1 hour running of the station. I've seen a lot of stations where, as the round goes on, it gets slower and slower - sometimes becoming nearly unplayable - so there's a bottle neck somewhere (even with servers that have a cap in player counts). Something, on these servers, is running out of room (so let's figure out what that is together). If it was a pure connection, throughput problem, the lag would happen from the start of the round. My guess is that it's just the CPU running out of room as it game goes on (hmm, any way we can offload this weight on the CPU to something else?)



Software/Bug Fixes - this is pretty much the end of my knowledge here - as I'm just digging into the code now - so any concrete information anyone can provide on exactly what the station does during the process of a round would be great :)



Thank you! Hope everyone has a great day!



Pro