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

[Ben Greear]

On Tue, 24 Mar 1998, Adam Wiggins wrote:

> [Matt Chatterley:]
> > On Sat, 21 Mar 1998, Ben Greear wrote:
> > > The game will need to update it's persistant storage very often
> > > to make this feasible. 
> > > I'm a little concerned about the performance hit on a DB, as I expect
> > > this game server to bring a machine to it's knees anyway...
> > 
> > A point to remember: Have the game *constantly* saving *small* amounts of
> > data. Don't attempt to do what bases like PennMUSH do and dump a large
> > amount of data at a regular interval - this causes quite a few problems
> > (or rather, will if you are saving more than a few megabytes).
> 
> I never got around to trying that idea that came up here (I can't remember
> who thought of it - maybe it was me) a while back, about having a parallel
> process running which did nothing but take a snapshot of the DB every n
> units of time and then dump them to disk in a leisurely manner.

> in-memory copy.  In theory you could update it as often as every ten seconds.
> 
> Naturally the only downside to this is that you essentially need double
> the RAM, but I see this as a pretty small concession, considering the price
> of memory these days.

The crucial part you are missing here, is how to do the snapshot?  You
still have to pass (copy) the data, either through a pipe or socket
or something.  It would probably be about as quick to just write it to
disk...  Of course, I could be wrong...

Ben

> 
> Adam


Ben Greear (greear at cyberhighway.net)  http://www.primenet.com/~greear 
Author of ScryMUD:  mud.primenet.com 4444
http://www.primenet.com/~greear/ScryMUD/scry.html