[DGD] Mutli-CPU Support?

[Kevin N. Carpenter]

My concept is for several machines to dynamically carry the load 
associated with different parts of the same mud.  Each part would be 
dynamic down to its existance, with parts coming and going from the mud 
on a slow timeframe (think hours to months, but without human 
intervention).  Each part would be unique via its detailed definition, 
but would, of course, require some common execution core.

The good news is that a group of students have taken augmenting 
OpenMosix with shared memory support on as their thesis project.  Of 
course, shared memory over any network is going to be slow, so I hope 
Felix's implementation utilizes shared memory lightly.

With shared memory usage out of the way, the real qualifier for being 
able to do this with DGD would be its use of multiple processes for 
multiple CPU support.  OpenMosix transparently migrates processes via 
page faulting.  With a decent network (100mb full-duplex is a great 
start, gigabit is, of course, better), this works very well for any 
process that is around for at least a minute or so.  For my need above, 
this is perfect, since the processes would typically be around for days, 
with some around for the life of the mud.

On a vaguely related note:  Memory is now cheaper than disk was not that 
many years ago.  I'm curious if the DGD swapping algorithm can be 
throttled, such that the mud won't swap unless resource utilization 
exceeds some set thresehold.  Hmmm, I guess thats what the "cache_size" 
startup parameter does, doesn't it?

Kevin C.

Felix A. Croes wrote:

>Kris Van Hees <aedil at alchar.org> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 01:07:23AM +0100, Felix A. Croes wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>But it does use shared memory -- and in fact, the goal is to do away with
>>>the necessity for multiple servers to run even a single large MUD (all of
>>>the big commercial MUDs currently do this), so I'm afrain I am moving in
>>>quite a different direction.
>>>      
>>>
>>Actually, one major large scale MUD (Ultima Online) runs its shards on
>>clusters (one cluster per shard), combining them through virtual portals to
>>create a single large world.
>>    
>>
>
>All the large graphical MUDs do this.
>
>I would like to do away with the technical reasons for having both
>clusters (several machines together serving a single world) and shards
>(several clusters serving several, identical but for the players, worlds).
>
>Regards,
>Dworkin
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