Quote:A mention there earlier of 4.5 GHz (which is fast)
However a more standard server 2.0 GHz can easily take the 128 connections limit, am I right?
Nope, standard 2GHz server would be able to host 50-60 without limiting of NPC activity.
Quote:What I am trying to ask is if the limit (which has been increased by scripting of some kind) is CPU power driven or I/O driven or Memory driven?
Definitely CPU driven... Did I mention it's CPU driven? Oh yes, CPU driven...:)
Quote:People's credits incr/decr and inventory changes all affect I/O as they are rarely lost in crashes or downtime...(that i have seen anyway)
Therefore is the I/O a factor in limiting the connections to the system and could the I/O balance be improved by distributing the data that is fetched and stored?
i.e.
Similar to what large databases do such as place indexes on a separate I/O device in a cluster system..
There are 2 parts of what server does, one is storing data for players and here yes, it can be compared to a database management system, but the second and much more performance-consuming part is taking care of all the real-time in-game processes. And this is very CPU-consuming. Plus flserver was not written to support multithreading, so the only way to improve performance is to increase frequency of CPU. Even at 4,5GHz we had to set the NPC limiting factor and NPCs had to be reduced once number of players reached over 100 players.
