[DGD] DGD/MP & OpenMosix revisited?

[Ragnar Lonn]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Felix A. Croes wrote:

> The interrelatedness of mail boxes is very low.  Mail sent to one
> mailbox doesn't affect other mailboxes.  This happens to be a very
> easily parallelizable problem.  I don't know what page ranking
> system Google uses, but I <do> know that if they use a large
> number of small servers for their database, they are constrained
> in their choice of algorithms.

Google uses Linux boxes. A lot of them. Even if mail is easy to
parallelize, the fact that people are doing so means that they
prefer a large number of small machines instead of a single
large one, for cost and/or operational reasons.

> In a MUD, the degree of interrelatedness is high.

Yes, but isn't that to a certain (maybe even large) degree because
people have designed them to be that way?  There has never been a
need to use multiple servers until the graphical MMORPGs arrived
and suddenly had tens of thousand concurrent players so noone has
really tried designing parallelizable MUDs until now.

> > in an OS upgrade situation than the single-server system as you know
y> > only a certain amount of users will be affected and can prepare the
> > support department for all the calls that will come.
>
> This is true for an infrastructure provider like an ISP but not, I think,
> for a MUD.  If you announce downtime in advance and keep it reasonably
> short, players can accept it in good grace.

Yes but that's just because people are accustomed to games being
unreliable and going down all the time. I might be wrong but I think this
is a maturity issue - when online games mature and get more stable, people
will be less tolerant of downtime issues (or glitches).

> For what it's worth, I think the consensus among MMORPG professionals
> agrees with you.  I just think that they are all wrong, and I have
> staked the future of DGD/MP on it :)

Have you really?  DGD/MP is a good feature in any case. MP-systems are
popular in server clusters ;)  (more CPU power per rack unit)

Well. I wish I could convince you somehow... of the usefulness of
clustering and multiple servers I mean. I don't argue that it might be
difficult to achieve good parallelism in a MUD, I just think it's probably
worth the trouble many times over when it succeeds. For future graphical
MMORPGs. If you believe it is possible to get all the performance anyone
would ever need from a single-machine MP system, then obviously you're not
so interested in spending a lot of time thinking about difficult
multi-server solutions. I guess I'll have to find some people who *are*
interested and just pester you with occasional DGD questions :-)

Cheers,

  /Ragnar

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