[MUD-Dev] Re: TECH: Distributed Muds

[Derek Snider]

According to Vincent Archer:

> Hmmm, no way. If you do so, you waste a lot of capacity. Since
> you're running on a distributed system, you cannot lend one spare
> processor to another zone - well, not in a geographical discrete
> model like the one outlined above. So you end up with processors
> that remain idle 90% of the time, but can support a population 10
> times bigger than what you usually have.

What is wrong with that?  It's called "being prepared".

>From the many years of server administration I've been involved with,
servers generally run at an average of 80-95% idle.

You always provision for bursts of activity.  CPU power is a
relatively cheap asset.

Anyways, my argument was more for off-loading whatever was increasing
load on your zone servers when the player population was high onto the
network handling servers than for increasing the CPU power of the zone
servers.

> systems.  One was managing the player (who connected to an available
> player box), which then in turn communicated with a bunch of
> (rectangular) world zones.

I'm not too clear on that UO's model is/was, only what a good working
model would be.  The above model allows you to take advantage of a
large TCP Window between the network servers and the zone servers.

If you are concerned about wasting CPU power, you might want to
consider setting up a server cluster (ie: Linux Beowulf Cluster) so
that you can effectively have one huge mega-server that distributes
tasks evenly over all CPUs.  I'm not certain that this is the best
solution for high-speed real-time interactive games, but with the
proper configuration, equipment and software, it just might be.

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