Priority Path-finding

[jonathan]

Animals (typically livestock) causes the server to lag too much because:

1. There are often a lot of them due to their quality as livestock
2. They are treated with the same priority as any other mob

Since large numbers of livestock are often kept in confinement it makes no sense to assign the same priority for path-finding to them as for free roaming mobs. Livestock mobs should therefore be significantly nerfed in terms of movement and path-finding.

[jonathan]

Improved as of 8.6.9-Blackberry, will continue to monitor this issue.

[jonathan]

Update, still some significant lag issues related to a large number of chicks (~400). We can now consider improving the scheduler to deny path-finding requests based on server load.

[jonathan]

I take it back, the Hydrazine path-finding implementation is already fast enough, it does not even register on the hot-spot radar even with ~600 chickens. It's the other AI tasks that are responsible for the load, specifically the entity move helper which doesn't technically have anything to do with path-finding.

At this point it would make more sense to implement a task scheduler at the high-level entity update tier. The only difference in terms of results from my previous comment is that it would selectively revoke any and all update CPU time for an entity rather than for just path-finding.

[jonathan]

I'm closing this ticket due to my previous comment. A new ticket can be created that more accurately reflects the diagnosis.