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

[Matt Chatterley]

On Sun, 22 Mar 1998, Chris Gray wrote:

> [Matt Chatterley:]
> 
> :A valid notion. My mud is being set up so that rather than the (standard
> :for LPmuds as far as I know) system of rebooting once per period of time
> :(usually 24-48 hours), it will reboot at any time within a period of 6
> :hours when there are no user connections open to the server.
> 
> Why do you need to reboot at all? If your system doesn't leak memory,
> and if it can save its DB to disk consistently while running, then there
> is no need. If it crashes, restart with the latest consistent copy of the
> DB. What I do is to flush the DB caches to disk periodically, and when
> that is done copy the resulting files to a backup directory. If this
> is done without allowing any other actual writes to the DB files (changes
> to the DB are OK, so long as no disk writes are done), then you get a
> consistent snapshot of the world.

LP does not use a DB per se - it loads a bunch of different objects into
memory as it goes, and it does leak (both in the truly leaky leak leak
sense, and also in the sense of no longer accessible, wanted or useful
objects which should be cleared away). The world isn't intended to stay
*identically* or fully consistant, but major elements of state are saved
by individual daemons.

--
Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
Spod: http://user.super.net.uk/~neddy/spod/spod.html