Zugg Software :: View topic

Apprentice Joined: 26 Sep 2001 Posts: 124

I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not simply because I haven't yet come across it on the boards.

zMapper seems to load all zones/rooms/links etc into memory right away at startup. This eats up a heck of a lot of memory for large map databases.

The thing is, these same .db files load up in zMud really very very quickely.

Im just wondering if this is a bug with zMapper, or if it's supposed to do this?
If it is, are there any plans on changing this ?

cheers

Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 4:46 am

That's correct. However, this is actually the proper way for this to work. zMapper using the Microsoft ADO/MDAC database software. When using a local database file (like the mapper .MDB files), normally ADO will "cache" the entire database itself. However, the ADO cache is very inefficient and is even larger than just reading the entire database the way zMapper does. I was able to get *huge* performance increases by disabling the ADO cache and just loading the entire file into memory at once myself.

This latest technology is in zMUD 7.05. zMapper has not been updated with the latest technology for this, so it can be slower than zMUD. And since development of zMapper is currently on hold until eMobius is done, you won't see any change to this for a while I'm afraid.

Eventually the more efficient zMUD code will be updated in zMapper, but I don't have any time frame for this.

Also, this becomes less and less of an issue as people have more and more memory. The largest map file I have ever seen was 40MB and that's really not much with todays systems of 512MB and greater. Maps larger than this can typically be improved using the database repair and compaction tool on the http://www.zuggsoft.com/data page.

Apprentice Joined: 26 Sep 2001 Posts: 124

The MUD im on has over 5 million rooms. This makes for very large databases.

Regarding the compaction tool. Is this the same tool that is inbuilt into the automapper for Zmud?

I tryed using that and my database size dropped from 63MB to 23MB.

Thanks for the info :)

Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2005 5:53 pm

Yep, it's the same tool. 23MB is a much more reasonable size.