-validated-

I'm the owner of stars.bitminery.com:4242 We can also replicate this in our staging environment with a vanilla build (+ a copy of production's blueprint DB).

So far I am unable to replicate. I Will continue to try. How many players are on at the time of spike?

NFD Build Server gets this issue periodically. We have to wipe the blueprint database, or the server lags and can even become unstable when people are doing stuff with blueprints.

It was independent of the amount of players; I recall the issue showing up with 3-5 players on.

Player counts has not affected lag @Chandler.

I can confirm @Ithirahad comment, we wiped our production server's blueprint catalog on May 7th, and lag related to blueprint catalog changes is now gone.

At the time of our catalog's reset, there were 1126 entries.

-Confirmed-
Recording of the issue From Player server.
Still unable to replicate on Dev.

Logs from a vanilla build, while working with @Chandler. Only changes were copying our before-deletion CATALOG.cat into world0/ and the complete respective blueprints/ structure as well.

Observations during the test session: the larger the blueprint, the more pronounced the lag. It's almost as-if the server is blocking-I/O while zipping the blueprint folder. During one test, there was a ~5 second lag between clicking "OK" for a core name, and the core actually spawning. Core spawn attempts were done immediately following a blueprint deletion request (as quickly as I could exit the blueprint menu, hit the x key, and then enter to accept the default name).

Server uses SSDs, no other disk-I/O intensive tasks were running during the test.

We had this problem on my server as well, StarSide. They even deleted all the blueprints and the problem is still happening.

Another server I tried, StarBits, was having this same issue, and they also deleted all their blueprints.

Point being, this does not seem to be a server-specific issue, but a broader one and it's leading the server admins to think there is a problem with their hard drives or the game reading all their blueprints, so they are deleting their blueprints.. which brings about it's own issues with everyone scrambling to try and save all their blueprints before the wipes.

In T1401#55053, @Benevolent27 wrote:

...
Another server I tried, StarBits, was having this same issue, and they also deleted all their blueprints.

stars.bitminery.com = StarBits

To reiterate: upon a reset of our blueprint database, the blueprint related lag went away.

In T1401#55056, @erthparadine wrote:

In T1401#55053, @Benevolent27 wrote:

...
Another server I tried, StarBits, was having this same issue, and they also deleted all their blueprints.

stars.bitminery.com = StarBits
To reiterate: upon a reset of our blueprint database, the blueprint related lag went away.

I forgot to mention that. I tested the blueprints on StarBits and there was no lag. But on Shattered Skies the lag remains after the reset.

Maybe @Raiben could throw some info here then.

As for StarBits, after the reset we started fresh with just the Vanilla Isanth series of blueprints. We're already back up to 225 blueprints, but no noticeable lag yet.

Random thought: I wonder if the breaking point is 1024 blueprints?

In T1401#55080, @erthparadine wrote:

Maybe @Raiben could throw some info here then.
As for StarBits, after the reset we started fresh with just the Vanilla Isanth series of blueprints. We're already back up to 225 blueprints, but no noticeable lag yet.
Random thought: I wonder if the breaking point is 1024 blueprints?

I was thinking the same. Other servers limit players to 0ne BP at a time.

In T1401#55082, @Chandler wrote:

I was thinking the same. Other servers limit players to 0ne BP at a time.

Could you provide a few example servers; I'm interested in seeing the type of playerbase these one-blueprint servers are attracting, server longevity, overall popularity/activity, etc. Limiting to just one blueprint seems quite extreme, especially if players would want to save a few in-progress designs, without a hassle of frequent uploads/downloads.

An offhand check of popular/active servers shows GenX@15, StarBits@20, Eyvalon@20, StarSide@Unlimited

Assuming it's related to blueprint count, should the whole engine really be blocking-I/O because the blueprint index grows larger than 1K?

The server is now off line, But at their hay day they reminded me a lot like yours, 10-25 players at least. Anything that cause lag was prohibited. That was the excuse for having only one BP per player. The server was mike lands btw.

T1401#55082

Well one BP is very extreme, the default is at 25 or so. And the restrictive ones I played on are at 10 or so.
(Or disable blueprinting in total.)

Even at a 1-blueprint limit, a very large server will run into this problem.