[MUD-Dev] [TECH] monitoring RMI-type systems

[Bruce]

Chris Gray wrote:
>> From: Bruce <bruce at puremagic.com>
 
>> I'd be happy to hear about non-MUD systems as well since they've
>> surely had the same types of design issues.
 
> In a previous life (up until about 2 years ago), I worked for a
> parallel computing company. We went from our own custom hardware to
> porting our system to Unix's and Windows NT.

... snip some good stuff ...

> Not terribly on topic, but Bruce did ask...

I originally had posted this in response to Bobby Martin bringing up
his RMI-like library.  There've been other discussions in the past
that brought up the 'dangerous' types of distributed systems.  A
couple of years ago, someone named Kipp had done a zone-based
distributed system using Cold.  From an engineering viewpoint, it was
full of problems like the ones that I'm asking about.

I've heard of other people doing similar types of transparently
distributed systems and spoken with some of them.  But none of them
were even thinking about or planning for some sort of debugging
framework.

So, while mud implementors are heading in the direction of some
distributed systems work, I think it'll be important in the long run
to see whether they go with the apparently-easier transparent systems,
or with the possibly more verbose systems that make the operations
more evident, but requires more thought.  I think we're in agreement
that the latter is the only real way to go.  But either approach
requires debugging infrastructure, and that infrastructure is
something woefully under-represented here on the list and in the
implementations of anything that I've seen.

I'm in the midst of designing a lot of other debugging infrastructure
for Cold, and realizing that I've not seen good debugging
infrastructure in other systems, nor much discussion on it.  Nor am I
seeing how I survived for so long without it. :)

But all of this leaves aside the actual design or utility of such a
system. :) Or that to some extent, if you're trying to migrate objects
based on inter-server messaging traffic, you might already need this
type of monitoring code.  (Which might make it more apparently on
topic for some.)

  - Bruce

_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev