Friday, July 6, 2012

Kaya 0.29 Alpha comes with huge performance boosts and GoGameGuru's Baduk TV!

Sit tight because im going Fast & Furious on this post!

Since we got out on december, there were always performance matters at hand. We are using a very small server ( this week i calculated it has 1/4 CPU power of my 4 year old laptop) so fine tuning it becomes a necessity quickly.

Last week the canadian open was coming and i wanted to improve performance before the event ocurred, so the server had less lag and worked smoother.

The event was very successful, and JeansebL is doing an awesome job with the broadcasts. It is very rewarding to see Guo Juan using Kaya for her public lectures, and we expect these activities to grow in quantity and numbers, specially after outing.

Unfortunately, the first day of the event proceeded before the updates, but the improvements were vast.

When the games got large enough (100's of moves) the game would start to slow down. It was a problem in the parser so i would have to revisit it. After making a small but significant change, i could reduce the processing by 4x , making it way faster.
But it still wasnt fast enough, so this week i devoted myself almost exclusively to performance. And oh boy did things get better.

As of today i have a complete understanding on how the server works from a performance level, from bottlenecks to pending improvements. This time, i improved the parser from that 4x solution to 50x faster. Its blazing fast. Which means games will run much smoother now and there will be only a fraction of the lag we used to have sometimes.

Also, i improved a lot of things from the main page. Its 10x faster and uses less resources.
So in this version we will experience a much quicker experience, and im dying to check it out :).
If all goes fine, and the performance fixes are polished, we are very well ready to intake a decent number of users. Beta is getting closer!


See you guys around!


2 comments:

  1. Nice!

    I'm anxiously waiting for beta, especially now that KGS stone sound issues finally hit me. Keep up the good work.

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  2. Beta...*drool*.

    Unless one would still need a supporter account... *sucks up drool*

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