Does Ryzom need any programming help?

[johntf]

Plus from a business perspective it's very bad to be in debt to a single playing customer who controls you servers, I mean in monetary and mental debt.

Not to mention having a cheap deal on a players servers doesn't exactly look professional when you go to banks for loans etc...

[clyne]

I thought I'd nicely bow out without correcting you in a public forum in my last post... but you are simply over estimating ryzom's and mmorpgs (in general) requirements. Have you ever had a close look at a mmorpg server architecture? From your comments I would say no.

However, I have.

Ryzom only needs to run 30,000 to 120,000 players in short term. It would hardly require even six of my servers at optimal performance. There is no need for those expensive IBM mainframes

Oh well, if you feel that your configuration is a must then it is fine. But if I were to run Ryzom or any mmorpgs that are more resource intensive than Ryzom, my servers are more than enough to serve 120k players at a time, trust me.

Besides the current configuration on my servers is paid ($900,568) for three years. This isn't really a low-end spec at all. *^.^*

*wishes her mother has that kind of money now, we have sure climbed down the ladder*

Thing is that sort of hardware only looks impressive if you are comparing it to a desktop PC. In the world of enterprise servers that is low-end commodity hardware. To give you an idea of the sort of hardware I would personally choose for this sort of environment, I would go for something like an IBM P595 which can support 64 processor cores and up to 1TB of ram, or if the PowerPC architecture didn't suit the code well, then a small cluster of IBM x3950 M2 servers. In either case, I would then connect this to a large, redundant fibre channel SAN (I prefer FC to iSCSI).
You are looking at a hardware budget of at least £5 million ($9.6 million) for all this. The real hardware demands may be much greater, I have deliberately erred on the low side here.
The most important thing your servers lack is a decent I/O shared storage, if you were to spend ten thousand or so on a low-end SAN you could then potentially cluster your 13 boxes and start doing something interesting with them. However I would stress that setting up and running this sort of hardware is not trivial, and you would need to pay someone around £30-£50K a year to run it (if you want someone who knows their stuff).


EDIT: to give you some perspective, the smallest production server I run has 8 dual core CPUs and 32GB of ram. And I would expect Ryzom to be a lot more demanding than what that server runs.

[clyne]

Plus from a business perspective it's very bad to be in debt to a single playing customer who controls you servers, I mean in monetary and mental debt.

That's true. I agree

[johntf]

Although offering to host ring scenario's might work. I don't know if its possible to do that I've never messed with the ring or seen it's code. They might be more open to that offer...

[fadebait]

I thought I'd nicely bow out without correcting you in a public forum in my last post... but you are simply over estimating ryzom's and mmorpgs (in general) requirements. Have you ever had a close look at a mmorpg server architecture? From your comments I would say no.

However, I have.

Ryzom only needs to run 30,000 to 120,000 players in short term. It would hardly require even six of my servers at optimal performance. There is no need for those expensive IBM mainframes

Oh well, if you feel that your configuration is a must then it is fine. But if I were to run Ryzom or any mmorpgs that are more resource intensive than Ryzom, my servers are more than enough to serve 120k players at a time, trust me.

Besides the current configuration on my servers is paid ($900,568) for three years. This isn't really a low-end spec at all. *^.^*

*wishes her mother has that kind of money now, we have sure climbed down the ladder*

Just FYI, $900K is only about £500K, nothing that significant at all. And to give you some idea, the top 12 and possibly up to 16, of the fastest supercomputers in china are those that run the Chinese WoW servers. China has reported a peak of 1 million online players, simulateously. if 12-16 supercomputers are required for 1 million players, then for 120K you need 1 -2 of the top 100 fastest supercomputers in china. And this is assuming that Ryzoms serverside code is as optimised and efficent as WoW, which is doubtful.

Sorry to say, but you may have a lot of money to spend on servers for a home/small buisness user, but that doesn't really mean anything. Apart for anything else, you wasted lots of the money you did spend by spending it in the wrong places - sorry to be harsh but I/O really is everything. You have virually no worthwhile I/O thoughput at all with your hardware.

EDIT: back in the real world, that really, really is low end. Sorry to break it to you, but I will routinely spend more than that on a single server.
EDIT2: those supercomputers have around 1950 cores each. So by that logic you would need about 18 times more than what you already have just to match the CPU power. As previously mentioned you would then need to spend a few more millions on a decent I/O subsys.

[clyne]

Good for you, hope you will be able to run a successful mmorpg one day as well - I am leaning on the mmorpg industry as far as my future career is concerned. So, what you wrote is quite informative.

Anyway back on topic, what are the odds they would accept volunteer developers? Current discussions brought up something that caught my eye, if companies can be hesitant to get a cheap deal on a server or be indebted to a player giving them an unprofessional look; wouldn't accepting volunteer developers give off the same image?

Just FYI, $900K is only about £500K, nothing that significant at all. And to give you some idea, the top 12 and possibly up to 16, of the fastest supercomputers in china are those that run the Chinese WoW servers. China has reported a peak of 1 million online players, simulateously. if 12-16 supercomputers are required for 1 million players, then for 120K you need 1 -2 of the top 100 fastest supercomputers in china. And this is assuming that Ryzoms serverside code is as optimised and efficent as WoW, which is doubtful.

Sorry to say, but you may have a lot of money to spend on servers for a home/small buisness user, but that doesn't really mean anything. Apart for anything else, you wasted lots of the money you did spend by spending it in the wrong places - sorry to be harsh but I/O really is everything. You have virually no worthwhile I/O thoughput at all with your hardware.

EDIT: back in the real world, that really, really is low end. Sorry to break it to you, but I will routinely spend more than that on a single server.

[fadebait]

Also, when Mutable Realms cancelled Wish, which was due in 2005, they put their hardware up on Ebay. This was supposed to support only 10K players.

It had 176 2.8GHz processors, 88GB RAM and 5.2TB of HDD space. For 10K players. Sorry clyne but you are way out of your depth here.

[fadebait]

Good for you, hope you will be able to run a successful mmorpg one day as well - I am leaning on the mmorpg industry as far as my future career is concerned. So, what you wrote is quite informative.

Sadly what I run is nowhere near as exciting However if you do want to get into this area and have some free time, grab yourself a copy of CentOS or Debian and start playing around with clustering, especially where tuning the distributed filesystems is concerned (GFS2, GlusterFS are two of the more usable FOSS versions) - you should be able to aproximate shared storage by using iscsi-target to get the disks in each box to masquerade as part of an iSCSI SAN.
EDIT: familarising yourself with Zebra and OSPF/BGP routing would also be useful.

[clyne]

Also, when Mutable Realms cancelled Wish, which was due in 2005, they put their hardware up on Ebay. This was supposed to support only 10K players.

It had 176 2.8GHz processors, 88GB RAM and 5.2TB of HDD space. For 10K players. Sorry clyne but you are way out of your depth here.

As said before, I originally bought those servers to rent virtual private servers for clients in my mother's hosting firm that is targeted at small-medium businesses. Those servers may not be suited to run mmorpgs from what you mentioned. This goes to show my research and study may have been wrong

Though another thing to note that Ryzom was developed within 7 Million or so, was it not?

[johntf]

Also, when Mutable Realms cancelled Wish, which was due in 2005, they put their hardware up on Ebay. This was supposed to support only 10K players.

It had 176 2.8GHz processors, 88GB RAM and 5.2TB of HDD space. For 10K players. Sorry clyne but you are way out of your depth here.

Well considering ryzom's older than Wish, and ran on hardware from many years ago. Wouldn't it be safe to assume whatever was the norm for server hosting then would be a lot cheaper and less powerful than what we have today now ?

I don't know anything about servers by the way so ignore me if I'm completely stupid, I do however understand depreciation and frankly how cheap it would be to run that wish thing now.

Not saying clynes thing can run them, not really looked at his specs all greek to me. But can't we make a reasonbale estimate on what it would take to run ryzom heh.

As for chinese wow needing 12 supercomputers to run it, thats a bit depressing. I mean a 2d game 10 years older than wow had 1 million players at once. Guess wow hasn't taken off so well over there.