[Nel] Network Connections

[Tom wright]

Guys/Gals,

 

Having followed your arguements so far, i though i would chuck in my 2 p worth.

 

1) i think you are going to find it very difficult to scale a server to 5000 concurrent users, using any kind of scheme unless its a BIG server.  Look at EQ currently, they struggle with 2000.  But this is just my opinion :-) so feel free to ignore it.

 

2) On windows NT/2k, using async sockets with events is a very efficent way of handling socket comms, and its quite easy to demultiplex the events to work out which socket caused the event.  I would recommend this route, as one thread could then wait for events to be generated on say 30 sockets and then take appropriate action.  unfortunately i can not tell you how well this is going to scale :-( Just look up WSAEvents for READ, SEND and CLOSE.  It does make your sending more entertaining however :-)

 

3) Windows did support something called micro threads, which had a much lower over head than traditional threads.  These ( if i remember correctly ) were designed specifically for scalable IO ( as in IIS ).  Some time looking here may well yield some useful results.

 

4) Some OS's have limits to the size of the array to select, Windows is one of them, typical values seem to be 64.  However using values this large, you are going to spend time thrashing the array looking for the source of the select, with events this is much easier and quicker, tho not linux compatible.  Wrapping up the comms like this specific to each platform is not going to be to hard, just code to a common interface.

 

Regards

 

Tom

 

PS A binary of the next release for windows would be nice, takes HOURS to build :-)