[MUD-Dev] MMORPG/MMOG Server design

[J C Lawrence]

On 20 Feb 2003 09:36:06 -0500 
Edward Glowacki <glowack2 at msu.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 05:12, J C Lawrence wrote:
>> On 19 Feb 2003 09:24:56 -0500 Edward Glowacki <glowack2 at msu.edu>
>> wrote:
 
> Considering the original author's post of running the entire setup of
> a MMORPG on one machine, I was thinking "good multi-processor server"
> as 4-way, 8-way, 30-way, n-way, probably stuck on Sun hardware because
> there aren't many other viable options at that level.  You know,
> something the size of a small (medium or large) refridgerator. =) By
> "smaller servers" I was actually thinking things like the 1U or 2U
> Dell rackmount systems (1650's or 2650's, respectively) that both
> support dual processors.  I really like those Dell systems, we have
> quite a number of them in production use here, and if I were going to
> build a group of servers, I'd probably start planning with them in
> mind as the server platform.

I won't comment on Dell in particular beyond: I've worked for
competitors, am not terribly impressed with their HW or price points,
and see little advantage over commodity off-the-shelf generic x86
hardware).  Ditto for Compaq, HP, IBM, etc.  That all said an approach
I've been wanting to play with is various equivalents to a blade box --
either directly using one of the off-the-shelf blade systems, or a rack
full of (say) ITX motherboards, 4 per U, all sitting on a CAT5 copper
Gig-E cross-connect with an ultra light weight messaging layer... With a
little work node cost can come in under $700 each (4G RAM per node, 2GHz
P4, etc, dropping down to $300 for lower specs), and then $$K for the
switch.  If you can sufficiently loosely couple your server architecture
for your game definition and keep your flash crowd/working set
collisions down so your backing store doesn't go insane it could make a
pretty interesting approach.  The early problem you run into there is
how very slow PCI is.

--
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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