Horizontal scalability ?

[Nicotz]

Hi !

I was wondering if Mangos supports horizontal scalability.

Does anyopne knows about this ?

[Ambal]

If you mean 'multi-processing' e.g. several processes hosting one realm - no, mangos is not capable of such things.

[Nicotz]

well... I'm not a network expert , in fact I want to know if it's possible to connect multiple servers, so that they work as a single logical unit ? I think its about clustering and load balancing but I'm not sure...

[Mister D]

Clustering seems like it is still quite far off at this moment, even multithreading and multiprocessing on the same machine is very limited at best if you add the right patch (mtmaps does this, right?)

You can only spread the load over several computers by giving the computers different functions. One login server, one world server, one database server (if I'm not mistaken there can in theory be 4 different database servers serving one realm), and if you want a seperate webserver, and maybe a seperate warden server if you want one.

There is database server software that will do clustering, but the world server is most likely to be the bottleneck (my own observation is that the world server process produces more load than the other components combined, with the database server process as a distant second, the login server process produces next to no load, and I'm not using webservers or warden. This is an extremely low population server, so with higher population levels this might be different. My point is, scalability is very limited over more cores, or more machines.

[Ambal]

Well, how many of you are actually host 'private' servers with 2k+ players? Latest mangos core with mtmaps patch is able to host 3.0-3.5k+ online or ~2k in single-threaded mode. We do not have time to create 'cool' things which will make sense for 1% of servers... And mangos is still officially is not multi-threaded.

[Mister D]

I hope I didn't make anyone think that I was saying multithreading, multiprocessing, and clustering should have a higher priority. There are many other things that are more important, and more complete functionality is far more important than bigger population servers.

For me personally multithreading is pointless, I'm running my mangos server on an old single core machine, and quite happily, my internet connection can't handle more than about 30 users at a time anyway, and I don't have that many friends.

[Patman128]

There's no robust multi-threading or multi-processing, so even if you use many machines together, it still won't be any faster, and will probably be slower.

[Nicotz]

Ok I understand thank you everyone !

I was asking this because me and my friends want to develop a MMO game. And you now that when you have a game idea, you think it's the best game ever . So we were thinking if Mangos server part can be very adapted for a game that may host lots of people.

If not, do you have any idea of an open source server that can do horizontal scalability ? Or do you think I should go and see licensed servers like Raknet ?

[Patman128]

It all depends on the game. You could do map-level parallelization where every map runs in a seperate thread or even process, or you could do some sort of other scheme. If you want to use mangos, you'd have to dump almost everything except the basic network code.

[Nicotz]

Ok thanks. I'll try to do some research and find if I'd find a better appropriate server.

cheers,

Nicotz