[MUD-Dev] MMORPG/MMOG Server design

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 22 Feb 2003 12:48:28 -0600
Keith Brewer <zyzebo at wolfpackstudios.com> wrote:

> Keep in mind that Intel architecture machines use a shared memory
> bus which isn't very friendly to highly contentious multi-threaded
> apps...

You should give understatement warnings for things like that.  Its
one of the more common reasons apps suffer performance penalties in
going to SMP.

> So that said, if you're even considering going "One MP Box" later
> on, I'd definitely recommend starting out on OSX as you can get a
> 2p server pretty cheap and you'll be better able to prep for the
> challenges you'll face when/if you step up to a platform like
> IRIX...

Yup, and slightly older (but still very good) SGI boxes are
reasonably priced on the second hand market.  Not bad for
dev/test/verify systems.  I've seen the gain from better bus
performance on Octane outweigh x86 CPU MIPs by a factor of five.
Sad, scary, but true.

> ... or Solaris.

The numbers I've read for bus and scheduler performance, especially
their scaling curves, for AIX and the POWER4 boxes are impressive.
I can't find the article I was reading, but these point in the
general area:

  http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ibmpower4/
  http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/446/borkenhagen.pdf
  http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4266
  http://www.cs.utk.edu/~terpstra/power4/p4Tuning.pdf
  http://publibn.boulder.ibm.com/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/aixbman/prftungd/2365c21.htm
  http://www.pdc.kth.se/training/Talks/Performance/SingleProcTools/more.monitor.html

--
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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