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Re: chat room

> 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?

Well, keep in mind that even AOL doesn't try to put all their users on the 
same machine at once..  they have whole clusters of networked systems to 
handle their user loads..

Even ignoring that for the moment, MOOs really aren't known for being the most
efficient systems in the world (flexibility comes at a price)..  They also 
are far, far more complicated and do a lot more processing than a "chat room"
does.. I really doubt that on even reasonably fast systems you could afford to
have more than about 60 people in the same room without having significant
lag.. If you're thinking about doing something along these lines with MOOs,
you'd probably need to so something like the setup used for the Aerosmith 
event a little while back, where many different MOOs were all hooked up
together to distribute loads away from any individual MOO..

"stability" isn't really the issue as much as speed is..  the MOO server can 
accomodate as many users as there's OS resources for, and if the DB is 
programmed properly, it can support a large number as well without any 
problems, but the main problem is that after you get to a certain point, it 
just gets too slow for the MOO to search through everyone in the room to find 
a matching verb for a command, etc, and you end up with huge MOO-lag.  This 
can be reduced, of course, if you put people in different rooms and just send
messages back and forth between rooms or something to simulate a "chat room"
environment, but even so, basic measurements with LambdaCore systems on
SparcCenter 1000s (which are pretty fast) suggest that more than a couple of
hundred people on the MOO at the same time probably isn't feasable..  If all 
you want is chat-room stuff, tho, you might as well use something like IRC 
instead..

-R
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Alex Stewart - riche@crl.com - Richelieu @ Diversity University MOO
                         http://www.crl.com/~riche/
            "Difficult answers lead to intelligent questions."
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