[MUD-Dev] Is database access a bottleneck?

[Miroslav Silovic]

Derek Licciardi wrote:

> As an Oracle DBA and a SQL Server 2K DBA, I always find it
> interesting when the MMO crowd turns around and says MySQL or a
> flat file system is the better solution.  I like to read that as,
> "My executives didn't think that the data that supports our world
> was valuable enough so we cut costs."  When you think about the
> data that serves UO, EQ, and the rest of them and place it next to
> the list of important things to your customer base, it should be
> clear that your data is THE most important piece of the
> architecture.  I would bet the patch serving and file management
> systems of many MMOs are smarter and far more evolved than the
> databases.

The problem is that a typical MUD does anywhere between 30 and 1
transactions per player per *SECOND*, and has 100-1000 players per
CPU (yes, this is insane, but that's how it is). Relational DBs just
don't do this. Until recently, anything that wasn't inflexible,
brittle, in-memory cloud of objects pointing at each other just
wasn't fast enough. To compound the problem, actually losing data in
a crash ammounts to only a minor nuissance to the players (few
people bitch about losing the last 5-10 minutes of gameplay, but
that's much less frequent than you'd think). So game developers just
didn't bother to develop a practical solution.

Of course, nowadays using a real DB /is/ becoming practical.

One encouraging example is SneezyMUD, they're using PostgreSQL for
their db layer (BTW, if there's any Sneezy developer on this list,
I'd *really* like to hear how they handle performance, and whether
they're using some technique to cache the objects, blob together the
queries etc).




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