Async db queries.

[Namrufus]

Queries should be pushed off to another thread.

May significantly increase the complexity of player interaction and block growth events.

[Namrufus]

Indexing and BLOBing the plant data is probably more critical to performance than this.

[WildWeazel]

If we can push all the growth stuff, anything that actually modifies the DB or the state of a block, into a single helper thread that's guaranteed to execute in the order that we queue to it, then it should take care of any synchronization issues like replanting a crop before it's state is updated. There may be a delay before your crops grow when you click on them but that's more acceptable. If that's too much load for a thread to keep up we could break it into a thread per quadrant or region.