.2 seconds an hour, or every few hours is nothing worth doing an overhaul like that. Just don't see the point is all.
Yea, 0.2 seconds an hour... for YOU, however successful shards with a large player-base would greatly benefit from an unobtrusive save strategy, just because YOU won't doesn't mean you should keep jamming your opinion about it down everyone's throat, if you've ran out of input for this discussion (which you clearly have, since you're repeating yourself) then maybe it's time to just leave it be...
Also for the record:
Easy backups...Right click save folder, click add to archive. Upload to ftp server, and email to yourself. Pretty damn easy. Some people just like to complicate things...and call it new and ground breaking. :/
This is totally ignorant, for one, not everyone has direct file-system access to their O/S at all times and manual back-ups can be easily corrupted, lost or even stolen.
A completely automated, comprehensive self-repairing and self-sustaining backup service is far, far more secure than trusting any human, including yourself, to keep track of and maintain those backups.
An easy backup would involve NO work at all, it would have been pre-determined by the aforementioned automated backup service.
Finding your root directory and manually selecting and archiving backups is way more time consuming and complicated than just letting a scheduler do it for you.
If you're going to upload back-ups to an FTP server, why would you bother e-mailing it to yourself too? Wouldn't it be more logical to just email the FTP file URL to yourself... I mean, sure emailing it to yourself gives you one extra backed-up file, but I think you forget just how many people don't have access to an advanced email account or one with enough quota to store files that can potentially be tens to hundreds of megabytes in size.
Some people complicate things by offering a solution without first thinking about what they are saying... and call it "easy".
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For the record though, there is no point in storing RunUO world data in SQL, at the end of the day you're still writing the data to the HDD of the machine, stored in 2 or more files (depending on the DB engine used) in SQL's schema directory. - Couple this with the possibility of the SQL machine being a remote host, you have to add on top the file transfer time, but that would just be silly in the context of housing RunUO world saves. - Then there's the overhead of SQL data filtering and indexing, the overhead from the SQL API and the SQL service itself.
World of Warcraft emulator ArcEmu uses MySQL for EVERYTHING and it really SUCKS, it's hard to set-up, it's hard to maintain and for the best part, there is no real way to interface properly with the data other than to use the native methods provided, any attempt to directly manipulate the data in MySQL causes synchronization problems with the server itself and things start bugging up.
The whole hype of faster save times is getting silly IMO, if you really want to impact your save times, buy more RAM, increase your page file and buy an SSD that supports fast write speeds.
There are 3rd party drivers on the net that replace the standard Windows drivers for SSD I/O access, which actually improve performance of the SSD by a noticeable amount.
I used this technique when installing Win7 on a Netbook with an 8GB SSD and 512 MB of RAM, prior to upgrading to 3rd party drivers, Win7 was a snail, I saw at least a 70% improvement in write speeds from an SSD that has a low write speed rating.
I guess the one thing to take away from this seminar would be to upgrade your hardware if you think your save times are too slow, or at least wait until someone comes up with the perfect solution, which will probably not be any time soon.
I'm toying with the idea of a new serialization system that could seamlessly replace the current one, without a .NET upgrade, the theories are written, they are just yet to be tested and dis/proven, none of them reference SQL at all.
There are a LOT of awesome things that should be in RunUO, there are countless things that have been disregarded in the past that SHOULD have been added to RunUO, a lot of those things were fronted by RunUO Team members, but never made it to release, if people look very close, especially at threads started in the past 4 months, they will come to realise why awesome features such as faster saving times have not been implemented. I wouldn't expect to see an improved serialization framework in RunUO any time soon, probably never, unless this community stops dragging it's balls along the floor and steps up to the task at hand.
P.S; Just because I know that I can come across a bit cocky with lengthy posts like this, I'd like to point out that the above was written with absolutely no offensive intention, there are a lot of people around here that can take a wall of text at face value and presume it's offensive and because of that I gladly challenge anyone who has a contradictory opinion as I love a good, well-mannered debate without all the poop-flinging