Shattered Kingdoms

We might have a memory leak, but I don't think so. We can be up for weeks and I don't see the amount of memory used by the server get signficantly higher than after a reboot.

Most games have some problems with memory over time. Even big MMOs will reboot their servers on a periodic basis. Although SK does crash occasionally, we are pretty stable. It's not unknown for the game to be up for weeks at a time. That's the biggest reason why the game starts to lag on a tick.

To explain briefly, when you update an area, the game has to get all of the items and NPCs from the area from main memory and feed it into the processor's smaller cache memory. When the game first starts up, all the NPCs and objects for an area will tend to be close together in memory, so most of them will be in the same memory page and the cache will only need to be changed a few times during the update. After the game has been up for a long time, most NPCs and objects that exist in the area are in completely different memory segments, so this generates many more page flips. If you are really unlucky, potentially once for every object and NPC being updated. This takes way more time to process.

The only easy solution is just to reboot more often.

Would a solution be a hardware up grade to a processor with a bigger l2 cache and a gig bus? Something akin to an fx57-58 on an amd 939 socket board?

Since, SK is on another co's server. I doubt it.

We currently run on servers that we own. That may not always be true going forward. However, what we have now is what was economical at the time we bought them. I'm sure that having a larger cache would help. The larger your cache, the less often you will need to reload the cache.

Newer and more powerful hardware is always going to have a positive affect on some level. But you have to work within your budget. And I'm pretty sure they still don't make cache sizes that are as big as the amount of memory that the MUD uses, so there are always going to be some page flips. Rebooting the MUD more often is still probably a better solution, even if both options had zero cost.