MOO-cows Mailing List Archive
[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

Re: chat room


From: jeanne@swnet20-01.swnetworks.com (Jeanne Davis)
>Hi, have been lurking on the list for awhile and have yet to see this
>question answered.  How many people can be present in a room in a moo based
>on the LambdaCore at once?  My boss wants the moo I am working on to have
>an arena (read AOL) style chat room, which can accomodate 1000s of users.
>Could they all be logged into the same room at the same time without
>compromising the stability of the moo?

Interesting idea... I love testing the limits on things.

AFAIK there is no theoretical limit on the number of people in a single
room.  However, one would think that the load on the machine would go
up as the *square* of the number of users (since each player in the room
could be generating text and that would have to be sent to each other
player...)  That would mean that 1000 users in a room would use on the
approximate order of 1,000,000 as many tics as a single user...  you'd
need a VERY fast machine indeed!

Since there are no suspend() calls in the code path for here:say, however,
the default Lambda core would not work at some point... the say
verb would simply run out of tics as it tried to notify the teeming
hundreds in the room.  Of course, you could rewrite the say verb with
little difficulty, but you'd still have to come up with all that CPU.

However, it's unclear why one would want to have hundreds or
even thousands of people in a single MOO room!  I have been in
MOO rooms with 30 people and it's impossible to keep track of
what's going on.  I assume that the AOL chat rooms have some
way to gag or mute other players?

Perhaps if you gave us a little more information about what
this arena is supposed to do...?

    /t

Tom Ritchford     tom@mvision.com   (212) 306-0414 
Market Vision, 40 Rector Street, NY, NY 10006

Verge's "Little Idiot" -- coming in HOURS to a player near you!
            http://www.fly.net/~tom/verge.html
Follow-Ups: References:
Home | Subject Index | Thread Index