[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc (long)

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 13 Jan 1999 09:37:55 -0600 
Koster, Raph<rkoster at origin.ea.com> wrote:

> To be honest, the storage overhead just for private namespaces
> seems prohibitive to me. 

Name assignments are simple name/ObjectID pairs, hashed by name and
indexed by MRU (old ones are deleted/forgotten) and
last-known-location.  Most command parsing is shortcircuited in the
namespace checks which do attempted-cheapest range evaluation of the
namespace expansion (you can't "hit" something that isn't present)
before running thru the local/global namespace.

Further (this isn't done yet), while namespaces are a property of
the character objects, they are external to the character objects
and exist as individual DB records (separate DB from the main object
DB) in their own right.  In attempt to minimise the working set
size, the result is that (hopefully) only the activelly accessed
index/hash-bucket-heads and names are kept in memory and the rest
sits on disk until called.

The really nice thing about thsi of course for intelligent/remote
clients is that all the namepsace querying can be done on the the
remote client with the server only used for reference storage
(master copy with periodic updates/quorum checks with the client).

> How much memory do you plan to use, and what machine are you
> running it on, and what other things do you expect to have going
> on?

The current machine has 128Meg RAM.  The next upgrade round should
add another 64Meg to that.  If I committed the machine to the game I
expect (rough guess) that to be just enough for say ~200 players,
and utterly bogged for any more significant numbers.  The real limit
is activity level and player proximity/grouping, which in turn
drives server working set.  I have no good feel for that as yet.

Scaling, as always, is an issue.  (Got my eye on a couple spare
0200's and a Hippi switch here...)

--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
(Contractor)                             Internet: coder at kanga.nu
---------(*)                    Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
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