[MUD-Dev] Complexities of MMOG Servers WAS Retention Without Addiction

[Bruce Mitchener]

adam wrote:
> on Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 01:50:36AM -0500, Amanda Walker wrote:
>>On 12/11/02 8:57 PM, bradley newton haug <brad at faithanddisease.com> wrote:

>>> While not disagreeing that idiots will mess anything up, with
>>> remoting (com+ and .NET, corba, pickyerpoison) and modern
>>> languages it's possible to write apps that run the same way no
>>> matter how many machines they are spread over.

>> Sure.  This doesn't mean that they will run well when spread over
>> many machines, however.

> We dumped CORBA (despite the massive advantages of such a well
> tried and tested platform): its too slow, by a consderable factor
> (for our usages).

What made CORBA too slow for you?

Was it:

    - The particular ORB that you were using?

    - The design of your system and how interfaces were exposed
    between systems?

    - The overhead of data marshalling?

    - The amount of time taken up by finding the appropriate objects
    and methods?

    - Needing more dynamic facilities?

    - Increased latency in remote method calls?

    - Poor throughput?

    - Lack of good performance analysis/visualization tools?

    - Something else entirely?

Was the work being done by the High Performance CORBA working group
at the OMG applicable at all or not to the types of problems that
you were seeing? (Some of their target demographic, at least for a
while, were router vendors needing high performance, real time
CORBA.)  Information about that working group, although pretty old
at this point, can be found at:

   http://www.omg.org/realtime/working_groups/high_performance_corba.html

Did you look at TAO (The Ace ORB), which is specifically designed to
be a high performance, real time implementation of CORBA?

   http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/corba-research-performance.html

What sort(s) of solution(s) did you end up going with instead of
CORBA? Was it home grown or something off the shelf?  What sort of
performance benefits are you seeing vs. amount of systems
engineering effort expended?  How does it compare with some of the
benchmark data from the open CORBA benchmarking data at:

   http://www.kav.cas.cz/~buble/corba/comp/

While I'm not (currently) using CORBA, it has been something that
I've considered in the past and would consider again in the future.
I'd love to hear more about why you opted against it in detail.

Cheers,

  - Bruce


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