[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] How big is enough?

[Vincent Archer]

According to Mike Oxford:
> You're going to hit technical limitations for scalability as well as
> your planned content base.  Doesn't do much good to plan for 500 hours
> of content (projecting 3-5k players at a time) and then be capped at
> 1000 concurrent users.  C10k today may be C20k in reality with today's
> hardware (I haven't done any profiling in a number of years,) but it's
> just a heads-up to keep your pipes/memory/bandwidth/CPUs/etc in
> consideration.

Note that you do not need to serve every single simultaneous player
from a single server front-end. Unless you plan for large-scale
battles in which the entire server gets concentrated on a single area,
you are better off with segmenting your world into individual zones,
with a transparent or specific zoning (transparent zoning means you're
handed off to a new server at "an appropriate time" without any
obvious effects, while specific gives you the loading screens almost
every MMO player is familiar with).

You usually need multiple servers to handle the game world itself,
so your architecture can either have a lightweight front-end that
essentially dispatches incoming connexions to the various zone back-ends
(which, if I remember right, is how UO worked), or you have a master
control system that tells your client to switch from one zone server
to another (which is how EvE handles its enormous world cluster, I
think).

-- 
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)