[MUD-Dev] Moore's Law sucks (was: 3D graphics)

[Chris Gray]

[Adam Wiggins:]

[Adam, can you pretty-please use some kind of signature? I just had to
go scan my mail file to find out who this was from.]

:An example of what I believe Mike was getting at - racking your brain
:trying to come up with killer optimizations is occasionally a huge waste.
:Orion and I spent the first year of our project obsessing over the amount
:of RAM and processor time our mud took.  We spent long amounts of time
:trying to squeeze every last bit out of the structures we allocated,
:and building extra lists to speed up some of the game loops.  This was because
:I thought it would be running on my 486-33 with 4 megs of RAM.  By the
:time we were well into the project, we had it running on a Sparc of some
:sort at the university sporting a nice big RAID drive and multi-hundred
:megabytes of RAM.  At that point the fact that our base server took up less
:RAM and processor time than tcsh was only amusing, and not at all useful.
:We ended up going back over and undoing a whole bunch of our optimizations
:that we labored so hard over and replacing them with what we really wanted
:to do in the first place.

For a client, I would agree that most optimizations are irrelevant. For
a server, however, a few optimizations can get you the ability to support
either a much larger world, or more players, on a given hardware platform.
That can be quite valuable. So, while I agree that it is no longer super
important to hand optimize things (possibly still fun, however), it is
still important to keep efficiency in mind. A wonderful MUD system that
can only support 5 users on a top end machine is interesting academically,
but probably won't be a success. If a wonderful server/world starts to
get popular, its nice if it can support the few hundred users that might
try to play it all at once. Of course, that assumes your internet
connection can support that load. So perhaps there is the easiest way
to decide if an issue of efficiency matters - does is slow your server
down so much that bandwidth is no longer the limiting factor?

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA