bantam
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A proposition..
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Sep 28 09:20 UTC 1998 |
Dear members,
I am writing this message in behalf of the CRPGA (Canadian Role Playing
Association), of which I am the coordinator of MUD activities.
We are a non-profit organization, which offers membership to people all
around the world, and arranges thereby a constant stream of info to
those people, including online games and other activities, to bring
those people together.
Across Canada we offer meetings and get-togethers, which are solemnly
organized by volunteers, what means we do not charge any fees and
solemnly rely on resources provided for free, like GeoCities web space.
At the moment we are looking for somebody to host a MUD for us. A MUD
(Multi User Domain) is supposed to bring people together, from across
the globe, and thereby provide some entertainment, fun and of course to
spread word about RPGs.
We have currently over 7000 members, which are more or less active. For
those people, who are online, and would like to engage in a talk, or a
game with us, we do try to provide a stable Internet place, but this is
not possible without support. I can not guarantee, that any of our
members will support you or us in this endeavor, but if you host our
service, we can make sure, that we do include you in our credits, which
are spread across the Internet frequently in out mailings, and encourage
our members to do whatever is in their might to support the service we
are on.
`
I would like to include some data, which I have gathered while testing
the MUDs software. (Personally I run it on a Linux Slakware machine,
with an AMD 486 DX 66 CPU, 32Mb RAM and a 14.4k modem connection to the
Internet.)
The software is SMAUG (www.game.org/smaug/) which itself takes up some
14Mb of physical storage space on a HD. In memory consumption the
program varies between 4 Mb and 9Mb, depending on the number of players
and zones/areas included. (Those are average numbers, with approx. 10
zones and 3 test players included, the number -can- change
significantly, when both factors change. For example : a 100 zones
and a 100 players may consume together as much as 30 Mb of RAM. And
with dropping prices for RAM, this should not really be a problem)
The impact on CPU performance, on the other hand, is minimal, on my
machine it just consumes 10% -15% of CPU power while boot-up, and some
.5% -.9% during normal operation. (Values can vary again signifincantly,
when a huge number of player is online, and is engaged in actions, that
consume a lot of CPU power, like fighting. Yet, it's unlikely, that all
visitors to the MUD fight at the same time). Per 10 players an
approximate increas of 5% of CPU load is to be expected. Again, I remind
that I am running on a 486 dx 66, with httpd, telnetd, syslogd, named
and other background processes present.
Along with the initial 14 Mb storage space, the MUD consumes some
approximately 2 kb per player on the HD, and some 2kb to 3kb of RAM per
player online. Data for zones and areas can vary, and be between 20kb
and 100kb per zones, with an average of 20 to 40 zones implemented at
one time.
The data stream is divided approx. 99% upstream and 1% downstream
(host). The output varies for each user and for each zone notably. A
good average is about a solid Mb per user per hour for upstream and some
10kb for downstream.
Those figures may vary heavily, when the player is engaged in talking
(chat)and not playing. Then the data is approx. 60-40, with some 100kb
upstream and some 60kb downstream per user per hour, values may vary
according to user's ability to type and amount of topics to talk about.
I would greatly appreciate an answer, even if it is negative. If the
answer is positive, thought, and you might require some additional info,
or any other information, I would be delighted to provide it.
Sincerely,
Robert Kowalewski
Suggested visits :
http://www.geocities.com/~phocas/ Internet HQ
http://members.xoom.com/bantam/ Project page
bantam@bigfoot.com
bantam@grax.cyberspace.org
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steve
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response 6 of 34:
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Sep 29 02:05 UTC 1998 |
The people who entered this item sound like true MUDfolk, and
that would be part of the problem with having this on Grex. Grex
would be spending more of its time dealing with MUD than anything
else, if this took off.
I appreciate the proposal that was given; it was written
stating such things as resoruce usage, which any system admin
would find useful.
Some technical points as to why this won't work on Grex without
a big impact.
- Grex is a Sun-4/670 computer, which is a little old. You
can't just add memory to it with one or two SIMMs, but in lots
of 16 4M or 16 16M SIMMs. This means that we can't just go out
and get a couple of modern day SIMMs and be done with it. So
while we can expand Grex to about 1.5G of ram, we have to plan
for that.
- Given the amount of memory that was talked about for running
the MUD, Grex would have to get more ram to do this.
- Grex runs on a 128K ISDN link; a bunch of users playing
playing MUD are going to make some impact on the link.
The disk usage wouldn't be that bad. Actually, disk usage
might be the only thing that wouldn't be much of a problem. ;-)
So, I don't think Grex can do this.
* However *
I think it would be really neat if the author of this item
and his/her friends would stick around and ask questions about
how Grex was formed, because I think that a system devoted to
MUDs could work. The costs could be minimal per user, if a
group of people worked on this.
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