My introduction to Lua has been through building a FiveM Role Play server using ESX v1.2. There's many inefficiencies in the code and I've isolated the majority of them which were causing "server thread hitches" in the server, but there's one thing I'm a little lost on.
There's an "extended player" object which holds a bunch of RP specific information aggregated from various database calls, commonly called xPlayer. Each player has a server id which is a number and there's a lua table called ESX.Players and the xPlayer is stored with a hash with ESX.Players[source] = xPlayer
There's a function:
ESX.GetPlayerFromId = function(source)
return ESX.Players[tonumber(source)]
end
which wraps the fetch by hash which is where we get lots of server hitches happening. In calling code I've taken out all processing logic to leave just this function call in place and the hitches happen still and commenting it the issue goes away. The question is why given it's just pulling from a hashtable causing lag when the things in the hashtable are already instantiated tables and are NOT reaching out to touch any IO or do anything fancy in the process? It's just a stored instance.
The one thing that stands out to me is there are a hand full of values on the xPlayer table followed by MANY functions. Is the weight of those functions on a Lua table enough to slow down returning a reference to that? This file shows where the extended player table is created and returned https://github.com/esx-framework/es_extended/blob/v1-final/server/classes/player.lua
I am in the process of pushing all those functions onto a dedicated utility table that will exist once and each of them take an xPlayer argument to be processed by the function. There's thousands of calls throughout the 100+ FiveM resources back onto the xPlayer.() calls, so the weight of code churn and regression testing is epic therefore right now the codebase is not in a state to release to a production server to test with 40+ players hammering it yet. Can anyone confirm if I'm on the right track, is lifting away the functions of the xPlayer tables likely to give me any performance improvement when fetching by hashed key? And if so why?