LÖVE

I've been using LUBE to program a network game for a couple weeks now, and recently I've noticed that the server I'm using gradually slows down over time. This is starting to get really annoying, and sometimes completely unplayable. Is there anything I can do about this, or is it just an issue with the library?

This looks suspect: Try commenting out the last line in the function. You'll get no backlog, but hopefully it won't slow down any more either.

What I would do:

• Replace Lines = '' by Lines = {}
• Change addline to

  Code: Select all

  function addline(text)
      if #Lines > 100 then -- something like that
          table.remove(Lines, 1)
      else
          LineNumber = LineNumber + 1
      end
      Lines[#Lines+1] = text
  end

• Change the drawing code to: (you might want to experiment with that)

  Code: Select all

  for i, line in ipairs(Lines) do
      love.graphics.print(line, 0, 780 + (i - LineNumber) * 14)
  end

EDIT: to be clear, the first part was a test to see if the slowing down was really due to addline. The second part is a proposed solution. Also, here's why:
Your string variable Lines kept on growing, and when you do "a = a .. b", Lua makes a new string object every time, and that gets more and more expensive when your string grows. My proposed solution uses a table, because it is easier to remove the lines you can no longer see and can thus be safely removed.

Thanks for the help! I can sleep easy now knowing that the library I chose is efficient enough for my purposes.