[MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server

[frosty at its.to]

On Tue, 17 Dec 2002, Dave Rickey wrote:
> From: "Lars Duening" <lars at bearnip.com>

>> Seriously: if you design the encryption scheme properly, every
>> player would have his own unique fixed key. Even if a single
>> genius manages to break one player's encryption, he would have to
>> start from scratch again for a different player. If you want to
>> make it even more difficult, use an asymmetric encryption.

> All of this strikes me as somewhat beside the point.  Storage is
> cheap (small fractions of a penny per meg these days).  There are
> valid design and business reasons for SPS, but storage
> requirements aren't among them.

Well in defence of storage costs enterprise level storage is no
where near as cheap as home pc or workstation stoage. While IDE
based disks are in in the $1.40/GB range SCSI based disks used in
enterprise style storage devices are much more expensive $/GB.

Why use these more expensive disks? Reliability, high performance
(15,000rpm vs 7200rpm) and flexibility. Also the disks themselves
are places in devices that manage the disk and these also have costs
that increase the $/GB. Add to that power, cooling, and management
by trained professionals and the costs gets up there even for a
modest amount of disk.

Having said that even a terabyte of player data is manageable in
terms of storage costs and systems that can handle that amount of
data are in the $25-50,000 range.  Unfortunately $/GB is not the
only factor was how many GB's you have to store on a drive. That
data has to reside in RAM at some point for it to be quickly
accessed and processed by CPU's.

Consider the situation where 100,000 players tried to view their 1MB
of data at the same time. That is about 1GB of data. Even over
gigabit ethernet 100GB takes more than a few seconds. Even at wire
speed it would take around 800-1000 seconds.  Probably a little
longer than most players are willing to wait for their inventory.

Point is there are a lot more limitations and costs that go into
storing and processing large amounts of transactional data than just
the raw $/GB that applies to a desktop PC. On the server side I
would expect that some of these large MMOG look a lot like large
financial institutions in terms of transactions/day.

So reducing storage costs is more than just reducing how much disk
you have to buy. It is also about reducing the amount of data you
have to process.

Having said all that storage cost is a poor excuse to justify
SCS. Give me the same storage across 3 chars as I get on 1. I am
willing to sacrifice storage if it means I get some more character
flexibility.

Cheers,

Terrence
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