Short: Better buffering of data sent to players
From: Gnomi
Date: 2002-07-14
Type: Feature
State: New
Driver: 3.2.9-dev.440

If too much data is sent to the player over a slow connection, it can happen
that the socket_write() consistently fails with EWOULDBLOCK (== EAGAIN under
Linux). The driver then discards the message even if a few seconds later the
transmission would succeed.

Reason for this behaviour is that the buffer for text to send is of fixed size
and has to be emptied. By making the buffer a FIFO (and extending the backend
loop by a new call to some send_pending_data()) this problem could be solved.

When implementing this, consider that the mudlib must be able to detect and
shutdown continually starved connections before the buffers grow too big.
Maybe a control efun set_max_buffer_size() for each interactive (with an
'unlimited' setting available). This might require calls to forcefully
'abandon' data from the mudlib, and an internal setting to let data expire
once a certain buffer size is reached (set_buffer_mode(): BUF_LIMITED,
BUF_UNLIMITED, BUF_FIFO).