[DGD] DGD vs. MudOS

[Kevin Carpenter]

Andrew -

I've been running a DGD based conversation mud for a couple of years now.
I can tell you why I selected it over MudOS:

1) It runs continuously.  I've had my mud up, without needs for reboots,
for over 60 days at one point.

2) If I had a reason to, I could code it so that the game environment
survived system and driver restarts making it appear like it never 
went down.

3) I have hosted MudOS based muds that have to be rebooted once or 
twice a day to relieve memory leakage problems.  One of the MudOS muds
I hosted would grow from around 2.5mb to 24mb in about 16 hours.  I
can basically tune my mud to use whatever storage I care to, having it
swap to disk as needed.  FWIW - I have my mud monitor its memory usage
and swapout() whenever it exceeds 6mb.

4) MudOS is a collective project (or at least it was) written by many
people over many years.  As such, there is often several ways, often
with several side-effects, to do even simple things like writing a
message to a user.  Having Felix be the sole driver maintainer results
in a clean driver.

5) With 20-40 people logged in, admitted only conversing, not do any
CPU intensive things like combat, my mud consumes about 3% of my 120Mhz
486.  I don't really care if MudOS is marginally faster processing some
implementation detail.

Don't be concerned with DGD being "disk based".  That adds flexibility,
and would only become a performance concern under weird conditions
(like you having a 10mb mapping that you routinely scan, but only
have 5mb of memory for the mud).  My log file IO rate is probably
an order of magnitude higher than my swap file usage.  The only
problem I've had is that it can take some time to write out a dump
file, if you want to restart later.  I've had some problems with
getting a test version of the mud to do this within the normal UNIX
shutdown period.

Hope that helps.

Kevin C.

Andrew C.M. McClintock write:
> 
> I have been following DGD for a while now, but have never actually done
> anything with it (other than download it a few times and give up for lack
> of documentation); I am interested in what DGD has to offer over MudOS. I
> am not trying to start any flame wars, etc: I'm merely interested in what
> people think are valid reasons to choose DGD over MudOS. The things I can
> come up with (from my limited knowledge) are that DGD uses less memory because
> it is disk-based, and the ability to save state over boots. MudOS has the
> benefits of being fast (is DGD faster? I have no idea, does anyone have
> benchmarks?), a fairly large set of efuns and support packages, and is
> documented. I am guessing that the disk-based implementation of DDG might
> be a double-edged sword, because constant disk access would slow things
> down (of course I have no proof, I just know that constant disk access
> using MudOS slows things down because every access locks it up). I would
> appreciate any discussion that would be pertinent to my questions, thanks!
> -Andrew
> 
-- 
Kevin Carpenter
(Expressing his comments from home in St. Louis, where this message originated)



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