It's been a while since I've posted on the forum, but I'm still around. I need a little advice on contrasting Eggdrop versions; hopefully some of you will be more knowledgable on the subject than I am.
Presently all my bots are 1.6.8, and I can get roughly 120 of them running considering the shell's specifications. I'd assume they're using about 4.5mb memory each. I was hoping to upgrade to 1.6.13 to take advantage of a couple of new features, but found out the test bot was using 6mb+ memory, meaning I'd not be able to get all the other bots running at the same time.
It's not a problem to downgrade, since I'd prefer room to expand in the future. I was considering going with 1.6.0 in order to keep udef channel settings at least. Which version of eggdrop would you recommend I use, and which modules are memory hogs and can be safely dropped from consideration? I need to be able to run at least 120 bots comfortably, with the 512mb memory on the shell.
I don't know what exactly you have put to your eggdrops, I have 2 from 2 different locations and both consumes mem: 72k and are 1.6.13. Probably one of your tcl scripts is the *hog*.. do a test and remove one by one until you'll find the guilty one, if one exists. I also have a 1.6.13 that consumes about 500k but I have on it many stuff but still should not consume that much. I'll do myself a check on it and try to resolve this matter..
Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.
a: Are you perfectly sure your allowed this? You call it a shell account, however, it sounds like your own, or a mates machines, because no provider should allow you to run that many unless you are co-hosting.
b: This seriously sounds like a flood-net, and I don't care if I get flammed for saying it. There is no serious reason to be using such a large compliment of bots for any other reason.
c: How can you honestly expect yourself to keep a channel, when it only take 1 person to DDOS a single IP address, and all 120 bots go poof.
2: All modules and scripts are memory hogs. It's a known fact. The more you compile in, the more memory needed to deal with it.
The rule is, only compile what you need, and not what you need in the future. Should you need anything, you re-compile, and install over your existing copy (it wn't hurt it).
3: No comparisons have ever been made between versions. We are not talking about MS Office or the MS OS's, where each version is insanly different.
People posting information about CPU and memory usage is 100% usless, and would be the base point of saying "YAWN". You can only test memory usage on your own system, with the libs compiled in and so on.
This is because memory usage varies between system libraries, version, modules in use, scripts in use, channel sizes, number of channels, number of users, information per users.
Unless we are using the same system, setup and userbase as you, we can't make sugestions here.
4: Back to running so many bots.
The more bots you run, the easier the machine is as a target.
While other flood nets may target one nickname normaly, servers often activate flood protection on that user. However, flood nets can flood 20 or so clones from a single machine, and they can place the machine to death.
While the bots are not sharing the same physical TCP link, they are sharing the overall bandiwdth. You flood one bot, and the others suffer with reduced pipe space.
You want to know how many you can run on the installed memory size, then the answer is likely more than you imagine. Just like on windows, there is a memory SWAP space (though much better), used for swapping memory in use.
On top, if you are hoggin all memory, on exactly the amount of eggdrop you are using, then your bots will swap out anyway. Mainly because the computer needs memory too.
All in all, the idea of running 120 bots from a single machine for any sort of purpose, is insanity at its finest.
I'd hoped people here knew me better, but apparently I was wrong.
The bots are running on a dedicated server that I pay for. I merely used the term 'shell' as that's what we've always thought of it. There's plenty of bandwidth available for them, and I've only experienced problems from one user who wasn't happy about an unrelated personal matter. Aside from that, overall stability is excellent. Since the bots are in channels that are registered with Channel Services, there's not a reason for random people to want them offline.
I use a couple of the bots in my channels, but the rest are there for more charitable purposes. Please see http://www.botservice.net/jun2002/ for a better explanation.
I hope this helps to at least clear up some of the misunderstandings.
P.S. Before somebody jumps in with "Why are you paying thousands of dollars a year to help people you don't even know?" The answer is simple: Because I can.
I've found the reasons for the unusual memory usage. First one is bseen.tcl was using up 2mb. I won't be using that on 'most all the bots, so nothing to worry about there.
The other one seems to be a couple of memory leaks in my script. I don't think I can see what's causing that, so I might put it into the tcl forum.
Ok, could I just get a little clarification on this please...
There's 512mb memory, plus 1gb swap. If I start up more bots than can be handled by memory, they'll start use swap? How is Eggdrop affected by having to use swap memory; would it be a significant detriment to the bots performance and ability to 'protect a channel'?
Appologies for bringing this up again, but I want to be absolutely sure things run smoothly, or at least to an acceptable standard.