[DGD] good hardware for a mud

[Christopher Allen]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 9:40 PM, Shentino <shentino at gmail.com> wrote:

> My first guesses would be
> * networking
>

For text, latency is more an issue then bandwidth. DSL can have terrible
latency, so you'll either need a T1 at home or do hosting (more likely).


> * hard disk speed
> * memory
> * CPU
>

None of these are significant for text games with modern hardware until you
get beyond 1000 simultaneous users. Then the bottlenecks will be in weird
places, often in the underlying OS, and often can be solved with better
optimization of OS or avoid code that triggers. SkotOS bottlenecks mostly
happen in event message passing, for instance when there is a large number
of objects that need to witness an event message being passed. So we now
limit the witnessing feature, both in the having fewer objects that require
that feature, and having the witness function itself throttle and otherwise
be more limited.

The real limits on small games is game design and coders time. We thought at
SkotOS that we could overcome this, but never were able to economically
scale this.

-- Christopher Allen