<HEAD><TITLE>discuss@charon: [78] in "Coldmud discussion meeting"</TITLE>
<H1>[78] in Coldmud discussion meeting</H1></HEAD>
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<HR><H2>Re: Best Platform for ColdMUD?</H2>
<H3>daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mon Nov 29 11:51:02 1993
)</H3>
<PRE>
To: Steven Owens &lt;uso01@mailhost.unidata.com&gt;
Cc: coldstuff@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 29 Nov 93 09:13:31 -0600.
             &lt;199311291513.AA11843@mailhost.unidata.com&gt; 
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 93 11:44:38 EST
From: Greg Hudson &lt;ghudson@MIT.EDU&gt;


&gt; Scott just went out and purchased a Packard Bell 486 DX 66Mhz with
&gt; 8meg of ram and a 400-odd meg hard drive, but he can still return it
&gt; if it's horribly wrong (Best Buy 30-day "no questions asked" return
&gt; policy).

This should be quite adequate for running a Coldmud server, although
it may be a little low on RAM for running, say, Xwindows.  I'd make
sure it's upgradable to at least 16MB of RAM, but that's usually not a
problem.  Certainly, for just developing a core database (that is, low
usage, without lots of people creating garbage as people do on
production muds), you're not likely to find memory or disk space
constraining.

Keep in mind that no one has experience with large Coldmud systems at
the moment.  Under Linux, Coldmud with the Cold World core database
loaded takes up about half a meg of RAM, but it will get considerably
larger than that before the disk-based database routines kick in and
hold down the in-memory size.

&gt; I'm assuming that running Linux or some other brand of free UNIX for
&gt; x86 machines is best.  How do FreeBSD and such measure up against
&gt; Linux?

I personally prefer Linux for its shared libraries, level of
documentation, and rate of improvement.

&gt; What kind of a load (disk space, RAM, CPU) would ColdMUD impose on a
&gt; regular UNIX system (i.e. what if he rents space on one of Netcom's
&gt; systems, or Colorado SuperNet?)?

I don't know what Netcom's policies are about leaving processes
running (especially mud processes, which have had a bad reputation
ever since LPmud).  As I said, nobody knows what the RAM requirements
are yet (hopefully not more than a few meg), and disk space is going
to grow linearly with the size of your database.  With just the Cold
World core database loaded, Coldmud's binary database is 88K, and the
text dump is 58K.

--GBH

</PRE>
