30 day battle records

I know I can't compete with giant clusters like bwbaugh, and it's not that scientific since it depends on what bots are submitted, but in case anyone's curious.. In September, I ran my i7 with 4 clients all month to see what I could max out at for battles contributed. Best I saw in "last 30 days" was 1,269,511.

I know my client spends more time on the upload than running battles, not sure if it's due to the extra latency from South Africa or just Darkcanuck's delays. That slow upload was one of my motivations for writing Literumble.

I built a custom results uploader which uploads battle results in parallel. Up to 15 simultaneous connections (configurable) are made to the server to work around latency issues. It makes a huge difference in melee, and also helps in 1v1.

As a side effect, priority battles are downloaded in parallel, and they are grouped together before writing them in the priority battles file.

If anyone is interested I can put it in the tools page.

I think it would be better to just allow both the server and the client to upload them in bulk, rather then one at a time.

It would be a lot more efficient to have batch uploads, but the work around above at least keeps backward compatibility.

Keep in mind that the delays in uploading to Darkcanuck's server were added intentionally because the server couldn't handle the load otherwise. So it might not be a great idea to circumvent them. But I do agree that they take a lot of time and it would be great to have a system with faster up loads.

On that note, maybe we should finally accept that Darkcanuck's server is "orphaned" and we need to setup a new one where we can update country flags / give people API access and so forth.

That might be an idea, and while we are at it we can add support for bulk transfers at least to the server. Perhaps a modified url for bulk download of robot pairings as well. This should cut off considerable time required to run the rumble, as sometimes the uploading can take as long as just running the battles.

My feelings are split on if we should use the normal rumble or the lite rumble codebase. I like the idea behind the lite rumble, but python leaves much to be desired in the area of performance.

I'm not sure we really need any special casing of bulk uploads. The uploads already fly with LiteRumble with whatever he's doing now.

I'm also torn, as Darkcanuck's server has a pretty robust feature set and is time tested with the huge load of a real rumble server. But I don't think it would be hard for LiteRumble to gain the new stuff we want and I love how lean and flexible it is. It's also a code base someone active is familiar with. And I'm happy to pitch in for resources if we need anything to support "rumble scale".

In december I ran my i7 with one client continuously, it delivered 280k battles in 31 days. It also depends a bit on the priority battles to do, a new micro usually is faster and delivers more battles than f.e. a new XanderCat. I was proud on my 9000 battles a day, I remember the time when only David Alves could deliver more battles per month.