0.47.14: Princess takes a long time to move

[mhjacks]

Environment

Standalone megamek 0.47.14, server running on CentOS 8 (JDK 11); clients running Windows 0.47.14 standalone megamek, with mixed JVMs

Description

Princess can take 5 minutes or more to move, which is a little frustrating for the players.
Understand that there are a lot of optional rules in play (fires, simultaneous fire and physical), as well as multiple c3 networks on the field, and lots of VTOLs. (The themes of these games are "beat up on Princess as a team", so we get a little silly with the cheese). Princess seems to do much better as the number of units decreases, so I wonder if we might have some inefficencies that this savegame might help to reflect that might be difficult in isolation.

We play over the network (with a VM I host on my own network, the other players connect from remotely, one from farther away; my client connects from my LAN). The MM server is a 2 vCPU, 4G CentOS 8 VM; the Princesses are joined from the station I play from (I used a Windows client this time; I normally play on Linux; the Windows machine has more cores/threads and RAM, but performance wasn't anecdotally better).

I played through the rest of the game on a 4-core, 8G Linux laptop.
autosave.sav.gz

Please note that I am not demanding or expecting a silver bullet fix here; just hoping that this savegame can help illuminate some things the dev team might be working on. Our group is very willing to try different things; I can tune the server or run experimental builds on the server or on my client. (The group takes some pride in being unofficial megamek beta testers.)

Files

In this game, the "live" players are Marty, guppy, and Specter. The always-princess players are WoB Main and WoB Support.

[Windchild292]

A common tip is to split the units into multiple princesses, with a lance each. That also lets you configure the units to have individual personalities and thus better utilize their mechs.

[mhjacks]

We do typically split the opfor into multiple princess, but the groupings are larger than a lance (or a lvl 2 for wobbies) each. Of course we can (and will) split the opfors up more. Trying to get a sense of where princess spends her "think" time - is it considering which unit to move? Or what threats/advantages there might be? How do map sizes figure in? I do work in technology, but I'm not familiar with the kinds of AI and pathing techniques used to implement Princess except in the most general ways. I recognize this might not be an ideal forum for Q&A either. We're happy to take and test any advice you may have, and deeply appreciate your interest and willingness to engage on the question. Thank you!

[NickAragua]

If you're creating bot clients from a client, then the bot client's performance is dependent on the client machine's specs and JVM memory settings, not the servers. Are you confident that the JVM from which you're running the bot clients has had its memory allowance upped from the default?

[mhjacks]

Thanks for the response! Yes, I'm definitely creating bot clients from the same client I'm playing from live. I understand the bot client uses client resources, not server resources - that totally makes sense. Is there a rule of thumb for scaling JVM memory for bot clients? (Such as, add 512MB for each bot client, or something?) I certainly have more memory I can give it.

[SimonLandmine]

My understanding is that, in most cases, if you've got some spare memory you can feed it (I don't!), it will probably help things.

[NickAragua]

A few other questions. What exactly is considered a "long time"? In the example save, is there a particular unit or units that take an observably longer amount of time than others?

[mhjacks]

Sure. "A long time" means 5 or more minutes for Princess to commit the move.
It seems to happen much more commonly with anything that can move 7/11/7 or more (like Assassins), or any VTOL (the Pinto WoBs are 10/15).

[mhjacks]

Note that this is with at usually exactly two princess controlled forces, and with the standard -Xmx1024m. I've normally split the princess forces into a WoB main (MD with MD omnis and implants) and a "support" force of WoB militia including vehicles