Lessons learned building a multiplayer game in NodeJS and WebGL

Re:Lessons learned building a multiplayer game in NodeJS and... by TazeTSchnitzel on Monday November 19, 2012 @05:38PM (#4806672)

>If you're going to deploy a long running node application that is going to be running a constant load, don't deploy it to either: A really low budget VPS

My multi-user node.js chatroom (http://ponyplace.ajf.me/) sustains around 60 concurrent users at any given time on a $5/month (not oversold) VPS. It can sustain a lot more than that too (151 at its highest yet after a 4chan raid).

The secret I find is in not letting your web server gobble up your memory. Don't use Apache, for example. I use nginx.

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Re:Lessons learned building a multiplayer game in NodeJS and... by robashton2 on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @07:02AM (#4813886)

Hey, I noticed the traffic spike and came to say hello.

The thing about a chatroom and load, is that your server is effectively just message passing, and if there is any CPU spike, that is all it is - a spike, which VPSs for the most part are fine with.

When you are executing physics and logic 30 times a second constantly regardless of load (so I made a mistake in phrasing there in my blog post), then you will be throttled on a cheap VPS because you're no longer being a good citizen - which was my point in that post if I recall correctly.

To my recollection, this hasn't got much to do with memory at all. I hope this clarifies what I meant to say a bit more.

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Re:Lessons learned building a multiplayer game in NodeJS and... by TazeTSchnitzel on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @10:53AM (#4814666)

Ah. I thought your point was more about VPSes and guaranteed vs burst RAM, which would be an issue. I see your point.

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