I just want to use this thread to point out some best practices for LFS World Querying, while opening a dialog with the 3rd party developer community and the 1st party developers.

If your attempting to find out if more then one person is online (PST vs HOSTS)
If your attempting to find out if more then one person is online, would it be more beneficial to query using only the hosts action, and parse the results from that? One query vs many, but then there is also a size (bandwith) issue as well as the hosts action produces a HUGE result, whereas the PST produces a smaller result while requiring more query's to the server. The question is, what is easier on the server? Many small querys, or one big one? What compression method to use on these querys to best help the server out?

This thread now also raises the question on how the back end of the LFSWorld server works, and how good it is at scalability. For example does it simply store this information into a database, and the devs have given us a front end to query that database? Or is there a raw flat file that we are querying? What would be easier on the LFSWorld server? Database is smaller and easier to manage, where as flat files with database makes LFSWorld querys fast ... at least in theory.

The concept:
Dygear is online at Eagle Race Night Server, he sets a PB on KY1 (Bump Drafting in the F08 Rules! Set many a overall fastest server times over at FM's oval server back in the day like that.) Now there needs to be an update to not only my profile, but also the world feed. So both of those are updated. The question for this example becomes, how many times is my profile hit, and how many times is the World Feed hit before it gets updated again? Flat files only really work when you do the work once and it's result it used many times, instead of having to re create the file over and over for each query.

Very interested on all of your views, and extremely interested with what the 1st party dev team has to say on the subject.

Quote from Dygear :

One query vs many

A single query (hosts) makes scaling your application much easier in my mind (effortless if you've written it correctly), so to me it's a no brainer. Always go for what will make your life easier.

Quote from Dygear :

but then there is also a size (bandwith) issue as well as the hosts action produces a HUGE result

When I was faffing with various LFSW related things Victor repeatedly told me that bandwidth is irrelevant for the developers, and given the cost of bandwidth is going down I can't see it being a problem still.

Quote from Dygear :

What compression method to use on these querys to best help the server out?

Given the number of people hitting LFSW, and what I suspect the spec of boxes are, I have the feeling that it's again largely irrelevant. I know that the db used to run in memory and then get periodically dumped out as a backup, but that may have changed, or I may have fabricated it completely (my brain is a bit fried atm).

gzdeflate is faster (or at least used to be last time I benched it), but doesn't compress as well. However, we're talking a few bytes here, maybe a few meg at the top end. If you're wanting to make things easier for the devs, then gzdeflate should be an acceptable middle ground imho.