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

[Matt Chatterley]

On Mon, 23 Mar 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Mar 1998 05:44:12 PST8PDT 
> Matt Chatterley<matt at mpc.dyn.ml.org> wrote:
> 
> > This seems to be an overcomplication, and probably less efficient
> > than just using single threads for each connection.
> 
> While threads are cheap, they are not free.  What are you going to do
> when you get 500 players online?  1,000?  5,000?  1,000 threads will
> drag any OS I know of on any platform costing less than US$50,000 to
> its knees.  

If you get to the position of having more than a few hundred players
online, you'll want to be thinking very seriously about distributed
servers, most machines couldn't cope with that sort of overhead (granted,
some very pumped SMP/ram-by-the-excavation-load superbeasts can), and/or
setting a cap limit on the maximum your machine seems to cope with
(obtained through trial and error), with some sort of login-time limit for
existing players (think BBS).

Even not using a thread for each player, you'll still be processing a vast
amount of information, and doing vast amounts of work, which would floor
you anyway. :)

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