WARNING[Server]: active block modifiers took 201ms (processed ### of ### active blocks)

Minetest version

Minetest 5.8.0 (Linux)
Using LuaJIT 2.1.1702296283
BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
RUN_IN_PLACE=1
USE_CURL=1
STATIC_SHAREDIR="."

Active renderer

N/A

Irrlicht device

N/A

Operating system and version

Alpine 3.17.3

CPU model

Intel i5-3320M (4) @ 3.300GHz

GPU model

N/A

OpenGL version

N/A

Summary

The message's "warning" severity is indicating that this is a problem that requires attention, except:

• It's generating one warning message every second the server is running, which is massively excessive and contributes to server operators and users ignoring warning messages.
• It is part of the normal operation of the game (ABM saturation) but there is no way for a game to indicate that it is aware of and accepts that ABMs are only run on an "as able within budget" basis.
• The fact that ABMs might not run if the server is too busy is a feature of ABMs, and a reason to choose to use them instead of other systems like Node Timers for certain applications, so warning server operators that a feature is being used as intended as if it's a "problem" is probably incorrect.

This message should really be reduced to "info" or lower severity, or an option should be provided so that games, mods, or server operators can lower the severity or opt out of the messages.

Even if it's possible to filter out these messages post-hoc, they still add up to occupy a lot of space in logs, which also makes log analysis slower.

Steps to reproduce

• Run a server on an inexpensive VPS or an already-busy server.
• Run any sufficiently complex game such as a large soup, or a game that uses ABM saturation by design, like NodeCore.
• Conscientiously follow server logs for any messages with severity >= warning