Some thoughts concerning database size
Friday, March 9. 2007
At the moment, 11k mobs and NPCs do take less than 3 Megabytes of WoW addon memory. I don't expect this to grow too much over time because there is only a limited number of unique mobs in the game and because with a growing number of people uploading data I expect to be able to filter out many "scattered positions" for many stationary NPCs at some point in the future = reduced database size.
The growing number of quests, merchants and recipes will however lead to a bigger database (my calculations point to something around 5 or 6 megabytes with 5k quests, 2k merchants and 1.8k recipes which should cover nearly all existing quests, merchants and recipes in the WoW world). That's the reason why it is already possible to exclude this data from your local database copy.
Loading time of course is an issue. At the moment MobMap with the current german database (containing 11k mobs, 1.4k quests, 500 merchants and 1k recipes) takes 0.8 seconds (and 3.7 megabytes of memory) to load at startup on my machine which is quite a lot. That's why I am already experimenting with a Load-On-Demand database. It's not hard to implement and gets the initial loading time for MobMap down to 0.15 seconds (using 550kbytes). Loading the database at first use then takes another 0.55 seconds (and 3 megabytes of memory).
But when thinking about Load-On-Demand, I might just go a step further and split the database into 4 files (positions, quests, merchants and recipes) which are loaded on-demand whenever the user accesses the specific part of MobMap. This however would require some severe changes in the data processing backend as well as the distribution system (= MobMapUpdater database download mechanism), but I think the changes would definitely pay off in the future, so this is what I'm going to implement.
The growing number of quests, merchants and recipes will however lead to a bigger database (my calculations point to something around 5 or 6 megabytes with 5k quests, 2k merchants and 1.8k recipes which should cover nearly all existing quests, merchants and recipes in the WoW world). That's the reason why it is already possible to exclude this data from your local database copy.
Loading time of course is an issue. At the moment MobMap with the current german database (containing 11k mobs, 1.4k quests, 500 merchants and 1k recipes) takes 0.8 seconds (and 3.7 megabytes of memory) to load at startup on my machine which is quite a lot. That's why I am already experimenting with a Load-On-Demand database. It's not hard to implement and gets the initial loading time for MobMap down to 0.15 seconds (using 550kbytes). Loading the database at first use then takes another 0.55 seconds (and 3 megabytes of memory).
But when thinking about Load-On-Demand, I might just go a step further and split the database into 4 files (positions, quests, merchants and recipes) which are loaded on-demand whenever the user accesses the specific part of MobMap. This however would require some severe changes in the data processing backend as well as the distribution system (= MobMapUpdater database download mechanism), but I think the changes would definitely pay off in the future, so this is what I'm going to implement.
