Is PocketMine a single-threaded application?

SOFe · Nov 30, 2016

aliuly said: ↑

As soon as you introduce threading you make things more complex, so that raises the bar on what Plugin developers need to know. On the other hand, a plugin developer can start with easy plugins and grow into the more complex plugins.

I agree, that's why ideally the plugin specification should tell the server where the plugin should run (i.e. per-world thread, main thread, etc).

Yes, that is part of the threading overhead. I never wanted to imply that Threading would magically fix all performance problems.

You can make life easier for new developers if you encapsulate the thread synchronization into some common elements that should work for 80% of use cases.

That depends on what the plugin does. For example most Mini game plugins are limited to a single world, so inter-world synchronization is not an issue in those types of plugins.

In my view, per-world thread plugins are those plugins that work heavily with the world environment and/or its state is specific to a single world like mini-games, or the ones that make lots of changes to chunks.

As a threaded architecture I think you could have:

The main thread - handles the networking and communication between the different threads.
1x thread per world for World state. - Manages the world state and sends messages to players/entities in that world.
1x thread per world for AI - handles the entity AI. This would need to have a synchronized view of the world state thread. This can be done the same way players get their view of the world synchronised. And yes, this adds processing overhead and memory consumption.
1x thread per player - (optionally), manages the player state, receives network messages from players and decides what should happen. Anti-cheat code would run here.

Anyway, this is just a suggestion, I am sure the real people in the PocketMine team has good ideas on how this all should work.
Click to expand...

I think this is good, but I think you may have overestimated the performance of multi-threading in PHP, which has such a threading-unfriendly nature.

robske_110 (Tim) · Nov 30, 2016

SOFe said: ↑

I think this is good, but I think you may have overestimated the performance of multi-threading in PHP, which has such a threading-unfriendly nature.
Click to expand...

Threading itself is an afterthought in programming at all!

aliuly · Nov 30, 2016

SOFe said: ↑

I think this is good, but I think you may have overestimated the performance of multi-threading in PHP, which has such a threading-unfriendly nature.
Click to expand...

Actually, I only see "multi-threading" as a way to make use of all the processors in a multi core system. Of course, if your server only has one CPU, all this multi-threading is wasted.

Is PocketMine a single-threaded application?

SOFe Administrator Staff Member PMMP Team Poggit Admin

robske_110 (Tim) Wither Skeleton Poggit Reviewer

aliuly Silverfish