Friday, November 4, 2011

Personal Build Servers Running Hot

Personal Build Servers Running Hot

The overwhelming success of personal build servers is evident – more than 200 of them are running on ROBLOX as I write this.
ROBLOXians in these servers are building so much stuff it is pushing the limits of ROBLOX to the max and beyond.
The ROBLOX team has identified an issue that will prevent personal servers with a ton of blocks from saving – things start to get shaky around 20,000-25,000 parts. Places above this size may not save correctly. You may lose work. As such Personal Servers should be considered a Beta feature at this point. We’re going to leave them on for users to experiment with.
For techies, the problem we are encountering seems to be related to the fact that the ROBLOX server is a 32 bit process. This means it can address 4 GB of RAM (2^32 bytes). Depending on the OS, half of that is usually reserved for system allocations, leaving 2 GB for user memory. We’re finding that personal servers fit within this memory envelop of 2 GB with up to 36,000 parts. However, the additional memory required to persist these places to disk fails to allocate and the save operation does not complete. There are several things we can work on to fix this issue – most of which will make ROBLOX run faster in general and are a huge win for our players. We will start attacking these next week.
Our ultimate vision has always been having 100 players building in a level that supports millions of parts. We will get there. It’s going to be a wild ride.
- Telamon

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