Room Cleanup

Destroyer2 automatically lets open rooms expire after a specified time to keep the database clean. The expiration time in seconds can be set with the EXPIRE_ROOMS key in the .env file. The default is after 1 day. See the customizing section for more information on available environment variables.

Waiting users in an expired room are kicked out. However, rooms never expire when they are full.

Cleaning up closed rooms in the game-server and the openrooms list used to track currently playable rooms is a little more difficult. Destroyer2 uses a multipronged approach to this problem.

Passive Cleanup

Expired rooms are deleted from the openrooms list when this list is read. This means that calls to the api/openrooms endpoint clean up expired but still visible zombie rooms.

However, as this endpoint is cached using the If-Modified-Since (opens new window) header, only new users passively clean up zombie rooms. This means that existing users might join such a room, cleaning up the room but causing a user-unfriendly connection error.

Aggressive Cleanup

Aggressive cleanup is an optional cleanup mode, where the server actively tries to clean up zombie rooms before a users receive an unfriendly error. This consumes a little more ressources.

Aggressive cleanup offers two modes to actively remove expired rooms:

• A regular cleanup that calls the openrooms endpoint at regular intervals without cache to activate passive cleanup. This mode can be enabled with the CLEANUP_INTERVAL key in the .env file, specifying the interval in seconds, in which the endpoint should be called.

OR

• A notification listener mode that activates Redis keyspace-event (opens new window) listeners to clean up expired rooms as soon as they are closed. This mode can be activated by setting the AGGRESSIVE_CLEANUP value in the .env to true.

  WARNING

  Keyspace-event listeners are only available since Redis 2.8.0 and might not work in every environment such as Heroku.