[MUD-Dev] Re: PDMud (was Re: Bruce Sterling on Virtual Community goals)

["Bruce Mitchener, Jr." <bruce#puremagic,com>]

On Friday, October 23, 1998, Chris Gray wrote:
>In a previous post, I was saying much the same as JC is saying above.
>A couple of months ago, I recall posting some results indicating that
>my server on this 300Mhz Pentium-II looked to be able to handle around
>500 users **ignoring network communication**. It is the communication
>that I think is the real cost.


On an otherwise unloaded Cyrix p150+, 32 megs RAM, SCSI drives, FreeBSD
2.2.x and an older version of Genesis (with relevant performance
improvements in the network layer since then), we've had 220 or so connected
users (scripts, acting out plays by Shakespeare).  That was without lag and
not very significant load on the CPU.  I haven't got exact numbers for the
load as it has been quite some time.  The reason we had stopped at that
point was the process ran out of file descriptors.  I'm looking for that
script again and plan on running similar load tests on an unloaded Sun E450
at work (Solaris 2.6).

The performance is definitely there in "softcode" systems, you just have to
have an efficient system.

 - Bruce