# chat room

Microwave Systems Admin (root@microwave.com)
Sat, 4 Nov 1995 13:47:48 PST

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    On Thu, 2 Nov 1995, Tom Ritchford wrote:

    >
    > From: jeanne@swnet20-01.swnetworks.com (Jeanne Davis)
    > >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?
    >
    > Interesting idea... I love testing the limits on things.
    >
    > AFAIK there is no theoretical limit on the number of people in a single
    > room.  However, one would think that the load on the machine would go
    > up as the *square* of the number of users (since each player in the room
    > could be generating text and that would have to be sent to each other
    > player...)  That would mean that 1000 users in a room would use on the
    > approximate order of 1,000,000 as many tics as a single user...  you'd
    > need a VERY fast machine indeed!

    Actually, if one used a very efficient :notify and/or :tell verb, a
    normally available unix system would probably be able to handle this easily..

    The default :tell, :notify, etc in MabdaCore are far more tick-intensive
    than they need to be.. There are many functions and features that one
    could stip out, if one just wanted a room for thousands of people to talk in

    >
    > Since there are no suspend() calls in the code path for here:say, however,
    > the default Lambda core would not work at some point... the say
    > verb would simply run out of tics as it tried to notify the teeming
    > hundreds in the room.  Of course, you could rewrite the say verb with
    > little difficulty, but you'd still have to come up with all that CPU.
    >
    > However, it's unclear why one would want to have hundreds or
    > even thousands of people in a single MOO room!  I have been in
    > MOO rooms with 30 people and it's impossible to keep track of
    > what's going on.  I assume that the AOL chat rooms have some
    > way to gag or mute other players?
    >
    > Perhaps if you gave us a little more information about what
    > this arena is supposed to do...?
    >
    >     /t
    >
    > Tom Ritchford     tom@mvision.com   (212) 306-0414
    > Market Vision, 40 Rector Street, NY, NY 10006
    >
    > Verge's "Little Idiot" -- coming in HOURS to a player near you!
    >             http://www.fly.net/~tom/verge.html
    >