MOO serving: what hardware is sufficient for my plans?

• Date: Tue, 3 Oct 1995 08:35:25 PDT
• From:
  andreas.dieberger@lcc.gatech.edu (Andreas Dieberger)
• Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Hi,

I have a sort of feasibility question concerning setting up a MOO.

We will organize a virtual conference next spring (as supplement and
extension to a real conference). The virtual conference shall be based on a
MOO with the MPL patch, that means it will serve some HTML pages itself,
but only small stuff (I want to have bulletin boards that can be read using
a Web client for instance).

Ok. Now for the load. The MOO 'space' itself will be relatively small -
maybe hundred rooms all together and not too many objects - a rather
smallish DB.

I dont think we will have more than - say - 20-30 people in it at the same
time that really *do* something. (And these will be normal players - no
building or programming will occur during the conference).

However there are two sessions that are called 'virtual keynote lectures'.
In these sessions there might be over 100 users logged in at the same time
(maybe even some more). BUT they don't do much. They mainly sit in a
conference room that blocks talking. One or two guys are talking, the
others are only listening. I think that should not cause too much load on
the server then. Or am I wrong in that assumption?

Well - here is the question. We are somewhat restricted with our funds but
we can buy a machine for that conference (or rent one). Our favourites
would be a high end Mac PowerPC running MachTen or any other unix that is
out there then - OR a real Mac MOO server if it is stable and fast enough.

As alternative we could set up a MOO on a Linux machine.

As I am no Unix freak I am quite reluctant to use a real unix box -
especially as we have to get a  Mac or PC for preparation work anyway. And
our funds probably are not sufficient for a decent unix box anyway.

Soooo... is this realistically doable using such machines, or is it
absolutely impossible to have that many users on a MOO that runs on a
highend Mac or PC. Dont forget that the machine will be 100% dedicated to
serving the MOO during the conference.

BTW: What would be the network load for something like that? The place that
organizes the conference has just some normal internet connection (dont
know exactly how fast, but it definitely is no T1).

Additional question: Does somebody have already some experience using a MOO
on MachTen? What about positive / negative experiences running a MOO on
Linux?

Thanks a lot for any hints, comments, flames, pointers and so forth... :)

Andreas



-----------------------------------------------------------
                     Andreas Dieberger
andreas.dieberger@lcc.gatech.edu    dieberger.chi@xerox.com
            Juggler@{TechMOO, JHM, MediaMOO}

 http://www.gatech.edu/lcc/idt/Faculty/andreas_dieberger/
-----------------------------------------------------------
"I don't even have an email address. I have reached an age
   where my main purpose is _not_ to receive messages."
                                            -- Umberto Eco
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