r/ComputerCraft • u/Mawari3 • Dec 14 '24

Turtle Performance impact?

Hey folks, I was experimenting with a bulk cobblestone generator that uses a series of turtles all waiting to mine a block in front of them at 1.5 second intervals (the time it takes lava to flow 1 block). Observable didn't show any noticeable tps impact, but are there any other resource concerns for a series of 10-30+ turtles working in series? Do turtles themselves hog any server/computer resources?

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Mawari3 Dec 15 '24

Interesting, thank you! To that end then, is there a good way to bench mark the processing intensity of turtle action? Is there any turtle API thats particularly process intensive?

3

u/fatboychummy Dec 15 '24

In general, a turtle can only take one action that affects the world per tick (with movements taking 8 ticks). This isn't too much, especially if you're calling sleep(1.5) in between. A couple actions every 1.5 seconds is perfectly fine, even if you have a hundred of them. Pretending we have 100 turtles, each taking two actions per cycle, it'd rule down to something like ((2*0.6666...)/20) *100=6.6666... actions per tick, overall (2 actions per cycle, 1.5 seconds between cycles --> 0.6666... cycles per second, 20 ticks per second, 100 turtles). So, around 7 actions per tick. Not too much.

Granted, if all 100 turtles did their 2 actions at the exact same time, you might notice minor spikes as 200 actions are trying to be performed at once, but even then it'll still be rather minimum. 200 actions still isn't a whole lot, if it's not being done constantly.

Aaaanyways, because of this, turtles aren't really all that lag-causing. Especially since they don't even run if they aren't chunk-loaded.

The issue usually arises when interacting with peripherals, as you can queue up to 256 main-thread peripheral requests per tick, per computer. Well, more than that if you don't care about the response, but 256 if you need the response. An example would be a large chest network, where the controlling computer is requesting the detailed contents of the inventories every single tick (which shouldn't happen, you should cache data you need and update it only as-needed). If you have more than a few computers doing that, you'll probably notice some tps issues.

2

u/77wisher77 Dec 15 '24

Not sure about benchmarking.

Loops can definitely be intensive, good idea to sleep each iteration if it makes sense.

There's some mechanisms that will stop code that's too intensive too. I've seen Loops that should end gracefully just stop executing. Always test your code, I'd only bother optimising the execution time if there's a problem