Hey there, I almost replied under the help me optimize my multithread server but thought no, this is my own question. So if your going to run a server based system sort of like Blizzards popular Battle.net, I know they have one main server which recieves your initial connection then it sends you off to the closet server. (Or is it server with the least lag?) So how many of you "hobbyist" or at least non net-million dollar companies have implemented some sort off online gaming community? I''m interested in starting a network game server soon, and I have a network specialist on my team of guys, but he''s more into setting up Servers and Hardware and stuff. He said he can do IP tunneling and stuff, but I''d be writing the server and selecting hardware. Any advice? Would anybody pay a $20 fee, to test their home made servers on a professional level server? Cause if we had enough bucks I could set up a system like Battle.net for us all to test on. But I guess as soon as money comes in no one is interested... maybe I''ll just make it advertisement service. (You have to click on adds with your buddies for a while to earn the service! ;-) Well any thoughts and suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks, Ben __________________________ Mencken's Law: "For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it's always wrong."
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." - Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science in 1949

I have no idea how Blizzard implments their server network but here''s how most companies do it for web sites.

Large web sites typically have not just one but many web servers.
And also many Applications servers that run behind them.

Setting up a cluster of servers always invloves load balancing and many vendors have this solution although implmented differently.

There''s lots of resources on the net to find load balancing algorithms for distributed networks.

Battlenet probably has a centralized login server, which is connected to many game servers, which peridoically tell the login server how many people are conencted to it, it''s bandwidth statistics, and various other things like memory/disk/cpu load.
This way when you spawn a game, it knows to start it on a server that it thinks has the least load.

Sound sound

Yah, I understand the theory behind. But has anyone here actually set up a small scale system like this with their own program/game(s)?

I think I understand how to do it. I was mostly wondering how other people did it, so that I could here what to do, and what not to do. Give me a head start...

We''ll see how it works.

Thanks,
Ben