[quote name='Burns']hm... should the server then remember all messages in a location and send them to each player that passes through?
i guess that would add even more load to the servers than the current system... but i'm not sure bout that, i'm no techie :/[/quote]
The server has to remember, also right now, who is in which location. And the server load problem, as far as I can guess, does not appear because the server has too few ram, but the CPU load is too high. But to speak generally, yes you get a little higher RAM usage, but save lot of CPU usage.
[quote name='Liberty4Life']so that really has nothing to do with server load, or at least i dont see way to make it better[/quote]
This little request means server load. The server has to check if you request chat message for your current location and not for somewhere else. Then all chat messages for your current location must be send to the client. This is done for every client every 7 seconds (I think that is the current interval). The server also has to do all of that when there are no new messages, which means waste of CPU performance on server.
[quote name='Kafuuka']Technicly you'd still need to send PING request so that the server knows who is still online and whose internet was disconnected.[/quote]
You are right. But you can do that in much longer intervals, lets say 5 or 10 minutes. Which still would mean much less load then the polling currently done by every client.
[quote name='Kafuuka']Something i did wonder about was if there's any way to permanently store images on harddisk, I get the feeling this doesn't happen (even if they're cached, cache is cleaned rather often) and images are a lot worse for bandwidth than plain text requests. I suspect most browsers will treat this as a security issue though.[/quote]
This is done in other browser games as well. All images are stored locally and you can set the path to the images on your local harddrive in the game. The links to the images are altered then and instead to point to something like [url="http://magicduel.com/images/image1.png"]http://magicduel.com/images/image1.png[/url] it points to file://C:\your\path\to\magicduelimages\image1.png. This will also reduce server load.