Decided to return after a couple of years off. Running around in the newbie academy killing things, I decided to time the combat rounds using %t (system time) in my prompt. Each one is taking about 3 seconds. Is my memory just bad, or are things running a little slowly? It certainly seems like the rounds were much faster before.

AKA crashing.

My guess is that they are doing some major debugging which may be slowing things down.

Since the server was moved to Phoenix I've noticed periodic freezes. I haven't been able to figure out whether it's a problem on the server or or a network issue somewhere in between my client and the server.

It seems to happen maybe once every 20 minutes. When it does I get no input or output for about 7-10 seconds, then everything goes back to normal.

It's a shared server with lots of other muds running and the slowdowns
are obvious, especially at peak times. The difference between me playing
late at night/early morning and afternoon is huge and this has been going on for
months now so I did something to help me pinpoint it.

First, I have ping running on the background. Roundtrip times are stable
around 60ms and there is minimal jitter with no packet loss. That tells me
that the slowdown is purely on the server and has nothing to do with network.

So I wrote a script for my mud client where it times every command I send to the mud.
When my client sends a command it starts the timer, and when it receives the output from the server
(for that command) it stops the timer.
The ping roundtrip to the mud is deducted (although this isn't really needed since ping rtt is stable)
and I simply log the results which correspond to time spent _purely_ on the mud server.

Example commands I timed include me walking around on civilized terrain,
typing where pk and who, score. Mostly walking around though.

Results:

During early mornings/late nights (non-peak) the times I logged are < 100ms
and do not fluctuate. Moving around the mud is _fast_ and feels almost instant.

During peak times (afternoon EST) results are all over the place and fluctuate a lot.

Walking around can take < 100ms or 300 or 500 or even 1000+ ms.
Same for where pk, score etc. Moving around the mud feels 'slow' and laggy,
it's playable but _nothing like_ what the mud feels like on non-peak times.
Also, the jitter and fluctuations in response times make it hard for someone to
anticipate commands and time lag in PK.