[MUD-Dev] TECH: Concurrent Process Based Mud (Somewhat Long)

[Bruce Mitchener]

szii at sziisoft.com wrote:
> From: "Eric Merritt" <cyberlync at yahoo.com>

>> Now, granted, realistically I could only support about
>> 8,000-10,000 seriously working concurrent processes on any single
>> node, but this really shouldn't cause a major problem, if I need
>> more processes I may always add nodes.

> Depending on your node, you may want to limit it to 20 processes.
> Context switches are expensive (relatively) and with that many
> threads/processes active you're going to bog rather quickly.

Erlang's 'processes' aren't native, OS-level threads/processes.
They're lightweight things intended for this sort of usage.  Check
out the Erlang white paper at:

   http://www.erlang.org/white_paper.html

That should help explain more about Erlang's basic properties and
how they might apply within the MUD sphere.  About a year ago, I
think I mentioned Erlang's documentation in a post about threading.
The relevant part of the Erlang book is:

   http://www.erlang.org/download/erlang-book-part1.pdf

There have been discussions in the past about MUDs in Erlang as
well:

   http://www.erlang.org/ml-archive/erlang-questions/200103/msg00157.html
   http://www.erlang-fr.org/articles/thierry_mallard_001-en.html

It also came up briefly in:

   http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/1999Q4/msg00259.php

I personally think it would be pretty interesting if someone put
together a MUD in Erlang (apart from the WorldForge people).

Cheers,

  - Bruce

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