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Re: chat room

Club Dred on LambdaMOO has a record of having 48 characters in the room 
at once, talking and so on. (I mean, a record for Club Dred. I don't know 
if other rooms have had more or not).

It was barely bearable. Dred's personal lag, from owning the room and the 
tasks that ran it, was beyond belief. He couldn't talk, or when he did, 
it came out as late as 10-15 minutes. Everyone else in the room also 
complained of lag. It was the most popular topic. The noise level in 
the room was extremely high. There were more than 10 different 
conversations going on.  Remember that people just -can't- keep quiet. 
They have to talk. At least to let others know that they are there.

A couple of things to bear in mind:
- the lag in general on LambdaMOO was high already at the time
- most of the people in the room had very tick-costly :tell verbs
- the room itself was doing things (though not really that much)
- there was much more than talking going on. (Bonkers and other social verbs)

On a fresh new moo, I'm sure the number could be reasonably higher. 
However, the noise level will grow as well. If you intend to have 100 
people as an audience, say, to a speaker, then you will -have- to 
programmatically keep them from talking in such a way as they interrupt 
the speaking. Whispering and paging would be okay, I would say. Just 
plain talking would have to be modified. 

Even then, though, I would be impressed to see 100 online people in one 
room. Any more than that would really, really impress me. I'm taking a 
guess that a 100 would be the upmost limit of tolerability. Would it 
bring the MOO to its knees? Depends on how many steps have been taken to 
handle the load. (i.e., tick friendly :tell and :announce verbs, 
queued_task() watchdogs, etc).

CDRS
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