Improving the performance of web servers for educational multiplayer serious videogames
Luis Salvador-Ullauri, Sergio Luján-Mora, Patricia Acosta-Vargas
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (Edulearn 2016), p. 8000-8020, Barcelona (Spain), July 4-6 2016. ISBN: 978-84-608-8860-4. https://doi.org/10.21125/edulearn.2016.0756
(EDULEARN'16c)
Congreso internacional / International conference
Resumen
In this paper, we present a set of features for managing web servers that host accessible online serious videogames. Serious videogames are games that are developed to be used on instructional challenges over several academic topics. With this set of features, the web servers are customized to improve the user experience of learners with disabilities in the interaction with online serious videogames according to their needs. Besides, we also identify and discuss rules about the study of the increment of the performance of the web servers that require interchange of information to implement concurrent access to data. The impact of the performance of web servers has been studied and documented over the last few years. This study focusses on answering selected questions over methodological guidelines and it suggest ways that can contribute to the institutional strategies related with loading of data from online videogames adding new ideas, but maintaining and respecting the guidelines of the company. We outline the best practices found in our experience over online videogames development and several trends related to the managing of information of each instance of the videogame. Besides, we explain how to write local tests for tracking statistics and locating problem areas are. The concept of serious videogames previously did not exist in Ecuador, but there were examples of Ecuadorian games that could be considered as serious games. For example, some histories and legends of the Culture of Quito. Several software has been developed in the classroom. Software also has been developed for the learning of programing languages and basic concepts of computer sciences. This software enables the learner to gain knowledge of programming through gaming development, but it is required that the performance of the communications between instances of our videogames that run online, have to be improved. Therefore, we expect to improve the performance of this software, optimizing the configuration of the web servers, changing the main parameters related with transfer of data and timeouts. Web server simple configuration does good jobs for simple applications. However when many connections are need to be handled, it may soon reach the limits of the resources in the web server. We research how to enhance the performance of web server to host online multiplayer serious videogames.