Beautiful Architecture

Thoughts on the Architecture

Perhaps the first question anyone asks of an architecture and its implementation is how well it performs. Although optimizing an architecture prematurely is the source of a multitude of sins, it is also possible to design an architecture that cannot be implemented in a way that performs well. Due to one of the basic choices in the Darkstar architecture, this worry is quite real. And because of the nature of the game industry, determining the performance of a server infrastructure is difficult to do.

The difficulty in determining the performance of a game or world server infrastructure is an outgrowth of the simple fact that there are no benchmarks or commonly accepted examples for a large-scale MMO or virtual world. The lack of benchmarks is not surprising, given that the server components of most games or virtual worlds are built from the ground up for a particular instance of the game or virtual world. There are only a few general infrastructures that are offered as reusable building blocks, and these are generally extracted from a particular game or world after the fact and offered to others who are building similar games. Whether it is the relative youth of the game industry or an accident of the historical emergence of the technology from the entertainment industry, no commonly accepted benchmarks are available to test a new infrastructure or to allow the comparison of different infrastructures.

There is also little or no information available concerning ...