"No you''re not. All you want to do is whip out your dick and start measuring. Have fun."
No, I really am interested. Because you apparently know everything and I just want to know where this vast pool of knowledge comes from. I''ll be the first to admit that I don''t know everything. But at least I can admit that I don''t know everything about everything. Obviously you have a problem with that. And I can only assume from your answer that you have very little experience.
"Let''s go by logic again, on this one. I run a pretty big web-server out of house (www.icarusindie.com). I offer hosting to anyone who wants an account. When I add the alias to Apache for the new user which do you think would take longer? Restarting apache or restarting the entire computer?
It''s logical that if you only restart what actually needs restarting, you''re going to save a lot of time. In Apache''s case, restarting the server just reloads the conf files making it completely transparent."
That''s great. And I''m very happy for you. My little sister could administer a web server running Apache, so you should be proud. But would you mind actually answering the comparison? I asked what takes longer to do. Restart an AI server or a Game World Server. You really need to separate the fact that a server can be either an application or the hardware that the application runs on. That further adds to my theory that you don''t have a lot of experience because you don''t seem to know the difference and can''t adequately defend an argument. Not to mention the fact that Apache is not the same thing as an AI server, which is what I had asked about.
"Oh, and to answer you question, it took around 20 minutes to log in 12,200 NPCs. The delay is mostly hard coded in the NPC client to keep the server from stalling. 10 logins per second was a pretty reasonable rate."
Finally, a straight answer based on fact. Thank you. Now I''m interested. How much processing power does the NPC Server average? What''s its utilization on average and how many of those NPC''s does it typically assume control of at any given time? I''m sure that you have it optimized so that if nobody is anywhere near an NPC so it doesn''t require interaction, then it won''t waste processing power on it.
Also, what kind of database are you running on the back end and what kind of perfomance limitations do you have running your configuration?
"With MMORPGs it''s asking to be looted/killed/whatever.
Unless you want someone to remotely take over for you while you go eat or something so you don''t have to restart at a spawn point, there''s really no reason for it."
As I said before, no matter what, a decent counter example can be shown for just about any configuration. In MMORPG''s, there are also sometimes safe zones. Not all of them, but some of them. And I can see a good reason for allowing people to take over for another player upon login. It is so they know that their character is being used.
If I try to log in, and I''m just not getting in, without an explicit error message to tell me why I''m not getting in, I might not know. Error messages are sometimes vague so that the developers of the game don''t give too much away to hackers. If I try to log in twice and see two different error messages, one says invalid username and the other says invalid password, then I''ve stumbled onto someone''s username. With a bit of research, I can probably find who that person is on the internet. Maybe hack a few lightly guarded web servers the person uses to find a few passwords the person uses, and then go back and log in as the person.
If you log in, but don''t start at a safezone, it should be fairly obvious to you that something isn''t right. I noticed the few times that I played EQ, my game tended to get dropped for apparently no reason. If the legitimate user is playing, and they get dropped for seemingly no reason, they may just think it is a server problem, and not a security problem.
And, the counter example to THAT is that the MMORPG''s should be checking to be sure that only one person is logged in at a time and validate IP addresses. If not, then report it to the admins so they can check it out. As I said, there''s counter examples for everything unless you specifically narrow down the problem domain.
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. I think this sums up nicely what smanches and I were talking about with respect to the "experimental" architectures of MMOGs. No one really knows the "best" ways to do this stuff yet. We can only really go on what is actually "in the wild" (released/in-production). Otherwise we cross our fingers and test it in development then hope the easter eggs don't bite us at launch (and they always do to some extent). 
