Shielding Success Rates Mystery

So, upon not getting to the bottom of this, I stopped running my rumble clients. Where are we with the discrepancy in shielding success on different systems? I don't particularly mind keeping my clients off for now, since I'm not submitting bots, but I do have quite a bit of CPU power I'd be happy to contribute.

I also still want to test with the newer XanderCat, Ubuntu 64-bit, and a different JVM on Ubuntu, but that requires Voidious-time and not just CPU-time. :-)

Not much new at this point. I greatly reduced my processing overhead in XanderCat 12.3+ in an attempt to improve on the problem (nearly cut average and peak processing times for targeting and surfing in half; see Version CPU Usage section of my XanderCat page; noting that my CPU constant is around 10ms), but since the problem seems linked to garbage collection, I don't think it will result that much of an improvement (I'm guessing far fewer skipped turns in later rounds but still a bunch in the first round, which will still break shielding). I may be able to reduce the amount of garbage collection by trying to eliminate as many local method-scope variables as I can, but that would be a lot of work for something that will likely make the code less readable and I don't even know for certain if it will help. Thus I haven't tried it yet.

Wompi indicated that using -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC to use the concurrent mark and sweep garbage collector eliminated the problem, but I don't think anyone was sure whether it was a good idea or not to use this as a solution. Not sure if it could cause other problems.

For now, I don't mind if you restart your clients. XanderCat 12.5 already has over 10K battles and I don't intend to replace it with a newer version for awhile.