[MUD-Dev] World Persistence, flat files v/s DB v/s ??

[J C Lawrence]

On Sun, 22 Mar 1998 12:17:33 PST8PDT 
Ben Greear<greear at cyberhighway.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Mar 1998, Greg Munt wrote:

>> I'm not sure of the advantages of binary flat files over ASCII
>> ones. I would certainly advise the use of a cache,
>> however. (Something which that TinyMUD never used.)

> I'm definaly not going to write a custom caching mechanism...much
> easier and probably better to use the OS.

I use a fairly simple extension of an LRU cache for my DB (now
persistant store).  Turning off the DB cache degrades performance to
less than 1/8th the transaction rate I can support with the cache.

There are reasons procesors have pipeline look-ahead, instruction
caches, databases have record and object caches, filesystems have
read/write caches, hard drives have caches on the drive itself, SCSI
adaptors have caches on the card, etc etc etc (between a single
fwrite() call and the disk platter there are 5 caches in my system --
all of them doing their job in increasing disk read/write performance)

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...