# HTML + MOO + NT = ???

Don Mitchell (donm@microsoft.com)
Wed, 5 Feb 1997 13:15:16 PST

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    If you think your MOO or ColdMUD is going to be a very big world, NT
    would be a better choice than W95.  In theory, you should be able to
    tune the network I/O and use a few I/O threads to get more throughput.
    I wonder if anyone has experimented with this?  A 'thread per head"
    doesn't seem wise (i/e/, one thread per connected player), but having a
    few of them doing the network I/O will practically never block.  You
    could also try using async I/O (which W95 doesn't do).  I noticed that
    FurryMUCK runs a seperate UNIX process just to do network I/O and
    concentrate it to the actual MUCK server -- basically the same idea, but
    I/O threads would be more efficient.  And of course, if you have a
    multiprocessor PC, multi threading gets you some parallel processing as
    well.  But read/write blocking is the main reason to do this.  If you
    think the world is REALLY going to be huge, you probably need Server NT,
    which unfortunately is expensive.  I know ftp servers running SNT deal
    with 600 connections or so, but I don't think any MUD on the net is that
    big.  Furry gets close to 400 on their P-100 machine (they're running
    NetBSD).

    Anyway, with NT or UNIX, it would be fun to hear about experiments with
    multi-threading and async I/O.