Improving Game Performance C#

Question

We are all aware of the popular trend of MMO games. where players face each other live. However during gameplay there is a tremendous flow of SQL inserts and queries, as given below

• There are average/minimum 100 tournaments online per 12 minutes or 500 players / hour
• In Game Progress table, We are storing each player move
  • 12 round tournament of 4 player there can be 48 records
  • plus around same number for spells or special items
  • a total of 96 per tournament or 48000 record inserts per hour (500 players/hour)

In reponse to my previous question ( Improve MMO game performance ), I changed the schema and we are not writing directly to database.

Instead accumulating all values in a DataTable. The process then whenever the DataTable has more than 100k rows (which can sometimes be even within the hour) writes to a text file in csv format. Another background application which frequently scans the folder for CSV files, reads any available CSV file and stores the information into server database.

Questions

1. Can we access the datatable present in the game application from another application, directly (it reads the datatable and clears records that have read). So that the in place of writing and reading from disk, we read and write directly from memory.

2. Is there any method that is quicker that DataTable, that can hold large data and yet be fairly quicker in sorting and updating operation. Because we have to frequenly scan for userids, update game status (almost at every insert). It can be a cache utility OR a fast Scan/Search algorithm OR even a CollectionModel. Right now, we use a foreach loop to go through all records in a DataTable and update rows if user is present. If not then we create a new row. I tried using SortedList and classes, but then it not only doubles the effort, memory usage increases tremendously slowing down overall game performance.

thanks

arvind

Answer 1

Well, let's answer:

1. You can share object between applications, using Remoting - but it's much slower, and makes the code less readable. But, you have another solution so you'll keep working with memory. you can use MemoryMappedFiles, so all the work will be actually using the memory and not the disk: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997372.aspx

2. you can use NoSQL DB from some kind (there are many out there: Redis, MongoDB, RavenDB) - all of them based on key-value access, and you should test their performance. Even better, some of this db's are persistent and can be used with multiple servers.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Using memcache would increase your performance