Best Way To Sleep An Empty Server

[Baker]

Any ideas on the best way to put an empty server into sleep in a way it uses virtually no CPU ever until someone connects?

[But will still allow typing in the terminal if needed?]

A thought I had to was to put the sockets into blocking mode if no players, so it just waits. But that will prevent typing in the console/terminal ...

[Spike]

unix? select. add both stdin+sockets to your fd list (use poll or epoll if you have many many sockets).
windows? ahahahaha... select socket+timeout is the easiest way. this can be done 'properly' using WaitForMultipleObjects + WSAEventSelect, but is horribly non-portable.

[Baker]

[dimman]

Lol spike, poll/epoll for say 10-20 sockets? Nah simple select does just fine and is way simpler

Baker: It's straight forward (in theory atleast). As Spike says, just add stdin fd to the fd set that select listens on (for console input) along with the listen socket. If you get input on console then handle that then back to the select, if player/spec then go into normal mode and when player/spec count drops to 0 back to select?

Quake sucks as inspiration source tbh, making things seem a thousand times more complicates than it really is

[Baker]

[Spike]

you should always know the best way to implement things.

and the easiest way too. and you should pick the easiest way and ignore the best because frankly the best way is too much like hard work, you'll get bored before its finished, and it'll end up never working properly. if you can leave your options open so that you can switch to the best way when the easiest way demonstrates itself to be non-descript mamalian excrement, you can have the best of both worlds.

I did put some emphasis on 'many' when I mentioned poll/epoll...
just use select. you won't notice any cpu use from polling stdin with a small timeout, and few people bother with dedicated consoles anyway - at least when rcon works properly. you might want to run a frame every now and then anyway so that the server doesn't have huge jumbo frames when a player does finally connect - that sort of thing can really mess with physics (or you could just pause the server, but then that can be weird too, especially if you're depending on the mod's timelimit to prevent Sys_Milliseconds overflows or other sorts of timing precision loss).

[Baker]

[Spike]

[Baker]