Re: PHP telnet server

Well the current system runs of a 20MB internet connection in London, seeing as that's the UK that about 2MB. It runs fine, responses are snappy even dealing with loads of users. This, however, is written in C: does PHP have that much of an overhead so that bandwidth is actually that much of an issue? On Thu, 1 Jan 2009, Per Jessen wrote:

Robert Cummings wrote:

It's not easy in any language, but if your key concern is the performance of PHP (as a language), hardware is what you need. You can design your software to run on a single box with lots of CPU cores, or you can go for a distributed (and more easily scalable) approach. If you don't need/want straight scalability, go for the 32 cores all ticking at 3GHz. Once that is saturated, buy another one.

If you go multi core then you need to go with a threaded approach... which makes the development a bit complex for newbies to MUD development.

'ceo@l-i-e.com' doesn't seem like a newbie to me, but you're right, it would be a complex job for a newbie. Nevertheless, given todays machines where even laptops have multiple cores, I would certainly design any new performance-critical application for multi-threading. (Multi-threading in PHP is a challenge in itself, and I wouldn't choose PHP for such a job, but that's a different story).

I don't think I'd go distributed since people whine about lag that takes a 1/4 second... distributed would inherently require more time while messages are passed to and fro.

That is perhaps a valid consideration, but isn't it easily dealt with by using gigabit ethernet or infiniband or something similar? The distributed vs. one big monolith discussion is also a matter of space, cooling, electricity etc. The big monolith is easier to deal with, but also carries a different pricetag. The many machines can be gradually expanded at a lower cost, but need much more in terms of infrastructure. /Per Jessen, Zürich -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php