Question

On a quest to learn a bit about Python and sockets I’m writing a little 2d-game server.

And although I don’t see more than a few people on this server at any given time, I want to write it as efficiently as I can.

I have a global dictionary called “globuser”, in it is another dictionary containing the user stats (like the X & Y coordinates)

Is that the best way to store them? How big can a dictionary get?
I guess you could also try to use a regular database, but that would be insanely slow.
Or should I use an entirely different scheme?

Can multiple threads access the same variable at the same time, or are they put on hold?
I guess when lots of users are on-line, every move would require an update. If they can happen at the same time, great! But if they each require to “lock” the variable, that would be less great.

Answer 1

One thing I might look at is storing the users as a list of Player objects. Look into __slots__, as that will save you memory when creating many instances.

I also would not worry much about performance at this stage. Write the code first and then run it through a profiler to find out where it is slowest — making blind changes in the name of optimization is bad juju.

Regarding thread safety and sharing of data, I found this, which seems to give some info on the subject.