Direct Play and 1000's of Clients
José Ivey
Anyboy have any exeprience with Direct Play and hundreds or thousands of
clients?
Do you use direct play on games of this scale , or custom functions?
David Springer
Igames is up over 700 simultaneous clients every evening. I support
DirectPlay but only at the game client level, not at the lobby
client level. Theoretically I could use DirectPlay at both the
lobby client and lobby server levels but I don't think anyone
has done this yet. Microsoft isn't even using NT at the Game Zone
for much of its backend server. They inherited a Unix based backend
from Electric Gravity when they bought it.
I'm using NT 4.0 server for everything at Igames. A single server
is running the web page (IIS), ftp, email, and the Igames server
software that I wrote. Everything at the server side is using
winsock. Interesting to note, the server is currently supporting
over 700 simultaneous client connections, and CPU utilization is
running at an average of 20%. More amazine, the server is just
a little Dell Dimension Pro200 with 128megs of RAM and a 2.1 gig
IDE hard drive.
The server is co-located at a local ISP (Jump Point Communications)
in Austin a couple miles away from my home. We maintain it remotely
using PCAnywhere32 over an ISDN. The ISP, which has a lot of other
people beside me using it, has a pair of T1 lines (1.5 megabit/sec)
each with a single hop to a T3 backbone. One goes to PSINet and
the other goes to UUNet. Smart load-balancing routers choose the
fastest backbone for each bit of traffic. It's really cool. A
co-located server means I supply my own server hardware and hook
it into their LAN (ethernet) then pay them a monthly fee for the
amount of traffic I generate. Currently I'm buying fractional
T1 (128 kilobits/sec) which means I can't average more than that
fraction of a T1 but I can burst up to the full speed of the
routers which is 3 megabits/sec.
Anyhow, you can theoretically use DirectPlay for all that but
I'd be leery of how well they have it tweaked for massively
multiplayer application. I'm going to stay with winsock for
the foreseeable future since I have it all working so well
already.
David Springer
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*************** IGAMES INTERNET GAME LOBBY ****************
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* NOW SUPPORTING MICROSOFT DirectPlay 3 LOBBY STANDARD ! *
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* exciting games and thousands of players. Game *
* developers, players, and ISP's can try it out at: *
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****************** http://www.igames.com ******************