[MUD-Dev] Re: TECH: Distributed Muds

[Derek Snider]

>From J C Lawrence on April 26, 2001 9:52 PM:

> Server lag when defined in terms of milliseconds for fringe
> populations is a near moot point.  We're not talking about
> continuous page swapping, but infrequent page swaps.

>> VM is fine for desktop machines, not for servers.  Those days are
>> long past.  Once your server starts swapping, performance goes down
>> the toilet.
 
> This depends on what the swap rate is.  A page swap rate of 1/minute
> is quite tolerable.  A page swap rate of 1K/second is not.

If we're talking about a million simultaneous players with 100Gig of
data (as you mentioned) a page swap rate of 1K/second seems rather
unlikely.

Fancy caching techniques work great for single player games, and for
client-side stuff.  Servers handling tons of players are a different
story.

If you design your system so that it expects that only 25% of the
zones are going to need to be in memory at once, and that it will page
out vacant zones, and page in zones about to become active, what is
going to happen when your million players get adventurous and spread
out all over the place causing 75-90% of the zones to be required?
Will the system break?  Do you want the players to be able to break
things by simply moving around too much?

If you want to have hundreds of gigabytes of world data where only 10%
of it is expected to be explored per year, or some such thing... then
maybe you should have dynamic data that gets generated on demand.
Otherwise it seems to me that a lot of creative effort is being
wasted, or you've auto-generated huge continents that do little more
than waste space.

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