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Three new changes have gone live today. Thanks to those of you who sent me feedback on these issues.

1) If you quit or are kicked out of an agency, any private case files are now marked as not-private. This is just to prevent private case files from sitting around forever when somebody leaves. All such existing stale files are now marked not-private as well (this is retroactive).

2) You are no longer allowed to store favor cases in Case Files. This change is not retroactive, so if you have favors sitting around in case files, they are still accessible. This change (along with #3 below) is meant to make treasure hunts more competitive and longer-lasting.

1) Most Case Giving Contacts now give you one less case option at a time.
15-39 = 1 Case offered
40+ = 2 Cases offered
The exception is your original Contact (Sergeant or Reporter), who will still offer 2-3 cases. The primary reason for this change is to make Treasure Hunts tougher (and hence worth doing), but it should also make contact building a little more interesting. I realise the downside of this is that older players had an easier path than newer players, but I think the positives outweigh the negatives on this.

If it was my PC it would be as slow in the morning (GMT) when there are 30 users connected as it is in the evenings when there's 100.

bilbot is so clever, I haven't got past using "tail -f flashlog.txt | grep evidence" yet.

The primary constraint on the performance of the server is the amount of case related records the game hangs onto indefinitely. You may have noticed that you can leave a case open on a given detective and still come back to it months later in the exact same state. That means we're leaving around millions of suspect, evidence, object, etc records for players who try the game out and stop playing in the middle of a case. It is convenient for players, but pretty wasteful in terms of database usage.

I ran a database cleanup script last night that removes a lot of historical data and it seems to have considerably reduced server side processing times (about 60\% faster thus far). I'm going to run a couple more scripts tonight that should improve things further.

Once that is done, I'll automate those scripts to run on a weekly basis which should keep us in better shape going forward.

The only difference you may notice is that if you leave a detective with a case open for a month or more, you may login to find that case quit. I'm also planning to start removing old, unused detectives, so there may be some previously taken detective names becoming available in the near future.

We do also have options in terms of buying more processing capacity. While Sleuth doesn't make a lot of money, it does currently bring in more money than it costs to run, so we have some leeway to consider that option if necessary.

There are obviously network issues that are outside of our control (how fast the internet is between each individual subscriber and us largely depends on your ISP), so we can't guarantee that everybody is going to notice these improvements equally.

It's certainly much faster Ben, thanks.

Yahooooooo, many thanks Ben :) its twice as fast now, i can do twice as many cases in the same time now !!!

It's a significant improvement! Smart move!

thank you very much Ben ^_^

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It's grinding to a halt again and there are only 67 players logged in according to the community page. Have you purged the New_Detectives that didn't complete creating a player? there were many thousands of them when Bilbot last checked.