CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jswebsocketsocket.ioreal-timews
Abdellah Sabiri
Abdellah Sabiri

Reputation: 396

NodeJs setTimeout for each game or one setInterval that loop each game

I'm trying to make a server for a role-based browser game, so what I did so far:

Once 2 players join the server, a room is created, then it starts its own timeout of let's say 10 seconds, once the timeout is done, it changes its state and reruns the timeout.

I'm afraid if I have many rooms that may impact the performance, so an idea came to my mind which is, create a setInterval that tick every second, and loop through all rooms to call an update, inside the room once update called, it will check last time it updated its state vs current time, if 10 seconds passed, it updates to the new start.

I'm afraid that with setInterval every second may be worse than the first idea, or the opposite?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 506

Answers (1)

jfriend00
jfriend00

Reputation: 707426

It would be far more efficient to let each room have its own timer than to have one frequent setInterval() that has to loop through all the rooms.

Timers in nodejs are super efficient and can easily scale to zillions of timers. They are stored in a sorted linked list and only the head of the linked list is compared vs the current time in the event loop. All the rest of the timers in the linked list have no regular cost - they just sit in the linked list until they are finally at the head of the list. There is slightly more cost to adding a new sorted timer when the linked list is long, but that's probably better than having a single interval that spends a lot of time looping through rooms that haven't reached their timeout. The nodejs timer system is just a more efficient way to do that.

Upvotes: 1

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