[DGD] DGD/MP 1.0

[Kris Van Hees]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 12:26:26AM +0200, Felix A. Croes wrote:
> Let's take a look at how large a "large" server could be.  In 1997,
> Ultima Online handled 1000-2000 players per shard, with (if I recall
> correctly) a 20 machine cluster for each shard.  Let's say that 1000

In private conversation, Raph Koster told me mid 1999 that Ultima Online
was running each shard on a Solaris x86 server farm composed of seven
dual-processor Intel-architecture boxes.

Anyway, let me add my congratulations to the growing list.  I fondly remember
conversations we had on The Pattern concerning drivers and MP-support (with
very interesting disagreements on aspects of it).  I very much look forward to
seeing DGD/MP once it is ready for people to see.

	Kris

> players per cluster is a reasonable number for 1997, and scale it up
> along with the increased speed of hardware following Moore's law; the
> number we get is more than 40000 players per shard in 2005.  Even
> allowing for the fact that the number of players won't scale linearly
> with the improvement of hardware due to increased interaction between
> a larger number of players, I would expect that the number of players
> per shard could be well above 7000.  Moreover, assuming the
> capabilities of DGD/MP on 1997 hardware, I do not consider 1000 players
> per shard as all that impressive.