Mesecons guidelines

just... why?

Overview

This page should help to keep the mesecons performant and efficient so that everybody can play with them

On/Off switches

• Please add On/Off switches to your machinery and toggle them on only if you use them

Intervals

• Use intervals of 5 seconds or more, depending on how much is connected to the wire
• Shorter intervals are ok if the executed action is not that heavy (for example: a simple light or signal)

Size/Length limits

• Try to limit the amount of machines triggered by LuaC's or blinkys

This should work fine with a 3 to 5 seconds interval

Luacontroller with on/off switch

The following program generates a signal-change every 5 seconds. It can be toggled with a switch on port A and generates the signal on port B

if event.type == "program" or event.type == "interrupt" then
 interrupt(5)
 if not pin.a then
  return
 end
 port.b = not port.b
end

Debugging

• Use the Monitoring page to see how the mesecons are working right now: https://monitoring.minetest.land/d/LjYzPumWz/mesecons?orgId=1&refresh=5s
• You can check out the lag-stats, if the average value is above ~750 milliseconds there is something wrong...
• Please also enable the mesecons hud with "/mesecons_hud on" to see how much CPU usage the current mapblock/position consumes
• You can also see the Penalty the usage results in. Penalty refers to the throttling of mesecons activity in that mapblock.

Example of heavy mesecons activity