Writing Low-Pain Massively Scalable Multiplayer Servers

http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmo-scalable-server/

by luccastera • 17 years ago

24 8 17 years ago

krakensden• 17 years ago

For a very particular definition of "low" I suppose.

It's worth noting that he spent 9 months writing and rewriting his server in 5 different languages. It's not often you write something with that level of understanding of the problem.

mahmud3• 17 years ago

Weird isn't it? Those who do not understand Unix systems programming are doomed to go language hopping for years.

High scalability and network performance is not a language or a library feature, it's a kernel feature.

viraptor2• 17 years ago

I don't think you know what he was writing about. High scalability was a language feature in this case.

Kernel doesn't provide an interface to send a message in an unified way to any of (decided during runtime) - local pid, local process name, process on another machine. Erlang VM does exactly that. Sure, you can implement everything yourself - along with process control, notifications, distributed database, live code reloading and put it inside kernel, but I doubt that's what you really want... Erlang provides all that stuff out of box using - yeah - unix system programming. If they spent more than a decade getting that right, why should anyone redo it from scratch?

His points:

- scalability (multi-master distributed database) - library feature

- fault tolerance (writing code as FSMs, ability to get information from remote nodes, notification about a node in a network going down) - language feature, not kernel

- load balancing (i.e. erlang's Distributed Named Process Groups) - language/library feature

You can of course deploy your own system of connection fault reporting, etc. But why do it, if erlang provides a node monitor and simply sends you a message when that node goes down?

Luc• 17 years ago

I wish there was a neat way to keep all game-related code in a more approachable language than Erlang. It would be great to have the difficult bits of the server in Erlang, with the relatively simple game code being maintained in e.g. Java by programmers that don't need to be experts.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

I'm not sure that poker is a game that's amenable to being "massively multiplayer" in the usual sense. Server sharding is easy and obvious with poker, unlike with MMOs where everyone can (potentially) interact with everyone else.

Writing Low-Pain Massively Scalable Multiplayer Servers

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