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# Re: chat room

- Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 04:52:10 PST
- From:
- Cc: moo-cows@parc.xerox.com
- In-Reply-To: <v02110101acbee5b39bc8@[204.245.64.42]> from "Jeanne Davis" at Nov 2 95 1:20 pm

    > 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."

References:

- chat room

- From: jeanne@swnet20-01.swnetworks.com (Jeanne Davis)

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