# chat room

Kent Pitman (kmp@harlequin.com)
Fri, 3 Nov 1995 13:29:32 PST

- Messages sorted by:[ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]

    MOO is VR.  It emulates, to an approximation, what would happen in RL.
    Its approximation of what would happen with 2000 people speaking at
    once in one room is really quite close to what would happen in RL.
    That is, unintelligibility.  Imagine yourself in a nice large theater
    discussing a play you just saw with literally everyone in the audience
    speaking at the same time.

    Ever watch an electronic town meeting (or a real one)?  You get a lot of
    people together.  How many get to speak?  How long would the meeting take
    if they all spoke?  VR or RL, it's pretty much the same...

    I concur with the sorts of things that others have already posted,
    ESPECIALLY about the O(N^2) problem.  And gagging as a basis for figuring
    out who should be speaking to whom is not really going to be a very
    efficient mechanism.  Gagging works when gaglists are short--it's not clear
    it works as well when your default is to mostly gag everyone and gaglists
    get enormous or when the number of people with noticeably long gaglists is
    also enormous.

    Why not take advantage of the one structural element that MOO offers which
    naturally fights lag: locality of reference.  Make it easy for people to
    speak locally and hard to speak globally: scatter people into different rooms.

    If you must have large groups, an auditorium-style thing could be
    constructed with only O(N) badness, as the speaker speaks to N people
    but they don't attempt to respond.  Give one person a room in which to
    speak or give that person a microphone and turn off the ability of the
    others to reply.  In fact, once you do this, your audience can be
    distributed into small rooms that have "TV screens" that see the main
    speaker and that allow small, localized chat sessions among small numbers
    of people...

    Some data points...

     - I also have seen 30-something people in a MOO room at once (at Dred's
       at LambdaMOO) and it's pretty close to unbearable pragmatically--the
       lag is pretty bad and the spam is awful.

     - At July 4, there was a fireworks show at LambdaMOO which had about 90
       people trying to watch (from different rooms in a broadcast style).
       For some it finished inside of 15 mins.  Others reported begin so
       lagged they didn't see the end for more than 2 hours after that.
       Some of this, it was hypothesized afterwards, could have been
       solved by taking advantage of the knowledge that the people had
       subscribed to the fireworks and hence didn't need a fresh
       gag-filter applied on every bang and boom.  In retrospect, too
       little work was done trying to tune the efficiency to accomodate so
       large a crowd.  Probably it should have gotten wiz support for
       :notify() instead of using :tell().  That would have cut down by a
       large constant factor if not more.  Of course, for your purposes, you
       must keep in mind that you don't get gagging with :notify() ...

     - At LambdaMOO, even with people in different rooms not all talking at once,
       lag tends to become noticeable when there are 200+ people doing things at
       once.  Perhaps some of those people are doing more than "just talking".
       And perhaps there are background processes doing things like mail
       notification that are taking up time.  But in any case, that's well short
       of a thousand, and they aren't even all in one room.  Many other MOOs I
       know lag down at 30-50 people (again, not in same room).