[DGD] Working sets and (dis)advantages of file-systems

[Noah Gibbs]

--- Steve Wooster <swdgd at intergate.com> wrote:
> What exactly is "the working set", and how does it affect 
> performance?

  The working set is the code/data that has to be kept in actual RAM at all
times.  That's the stuff that gets constantly used and re-used.  For instance,
the entire Kernel library is likely to be part of your working set, if you use
it, because pretty much every object in it gets constantly used.  Similarly,
several of your objects in /usr/System are going to get constantly used, so
they'll almost never be swapped out.

  A small working set means that you've got fewer bytes of memory that are
constantly used.  It's about the total size in bytes, not the number of
functions, but having more functions in the AUTO object will make your objects
slightly larger, so they'll take more bytes of memory, so your working set will
be larger.  Capisce?

> So then that got me wondering, why not have the
> whole file system be part of the mudlib, so it's OS independant?

  You can absolutely do that.  However, that means you can't use standard tools
on them.  Grep and find, for instance, are just astoundingly useful, and
writing all your own equivalent tools in LPC gets tiring.  You could write a
tool to export an FTP server or NFS drive and mount *that* as a file system,
but debugging the case-sensitivity and security bugs in that will be just as
time-consuming as just debugging the same bugs for filesystem access.

  But yeah, it'll work just fine.  It also has the advantage that you can do
per-file security in ways that are good for MUDs that your native OS may not
do.  Again, you've just got to figure out how to *use* it since you won't have
all the usual tools.

> PS, is this list an ok place to discuss general mud design or should
> I focus on the 
> more technical aspects?

  We talk about a lot of stuff here that isn't entirely DGD-specific.  I don't
see why we should stop now.  You'll probably get more takers and better
responses if you ask about DGD stuff, though, or how DGD's features could help
you with a given system.




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