[Discussion] Tackling performance issues and Loadbalancing

Now that XMage gets more and more popular averaging 900 users in peak, the responsiveness of the user interface is heavily affected. You can observe that by reading chat and playing yourself.

I have not looked into the network protocol part of the code so I'll leave that to people who designed it to make a comment on that if it could be even more compact (unless it's not the bandwith that's the issue). Or perahps too heavily compressed and it's the decompression on the server side that eats up so much computing power? In such case perhaps we can consider removing it? XMage is purely desktop game so it doesn't require to be bandwith efficient on the client side (we're not targeting mobile after all).

Or is it the AI that's so heavy? Perhaps consider then moving AI to another server and host xmage servers that are AI only.

Last but not least (and probably most important) -- I understand that XMage can't work under loadbalancer (under current implementation) -- that is -- you can't run multiple instances of the same server on multiple machines and have only 1 of them hosting "lobby" which only shows list of users and running games but let the games be handled by different servers?

I'd like to leave it open to discussion what others can do because hosting additional servers doesn't make much difference if they are going to be empty then nobody will use them anyway.