Photon in Cloud Server

markharoldr

Hello,

Is it ok to host Photon in a Cloud Server? If it is, can you recommend a cloud service that a lot of Photon developers are using?

Yours,
Mark

dreamora

Its ok, just keep in mind that you need a license for each server in the cloud to host it there (unless you are an indie and can get the all indie license).

as for where: we host in rackspace, would heavily recomment to not go to amazon cause their service is a nightmare for realtime use with ping fluctuations from 100-5000ms and crap like that. its fine for webpages but I would not touch it for anything else

markharoldr

Thanks dreamora.

I also have other questions.

1. How many players can be supported by a server in a rackspace? For example if I have around 10k players in a mmo world, would one server be enough?

2. Should I also set a separate server in rackspace for database, if the game is database extensive?

Please help me with these, It's just that I need information for the right kind of server infrastructure for a huge game.

dreamora

1. If thats concurrently and a real mmo, not 'facebook dumbifications' with millions of players playing alone with friendslist, then no. Thats a matter of half a dozen to a dozen physical machines multicore to multi processor machines, not even needfully a thing you will want to handle in a cloud anymore at all due to the tradeoffs of the virtual systems

2. Yes, so you can ramp up the ram on it as DB = lots of ram or lots of trouble

markharoldr

Dreamora,

So it means that it will be better if we will just have a dedicated hosting incase we have that bunch of players playing concurrently? It's just hard to come up with the best server architecture for such games. Do you have suggestions that I need to keep in mind whenever designing a server architecture?

Thank you very much.

Yours,
Mark

dreamora

The only real suggestion I have is try and test it on a large enough scale early, measure the overheads (to see if more servers or more processors in one server would help) and minimize the overheads of the server to server communications ...

MMO backends are among the most complex things in networking as server development out of my experience and its significantly easier to fuck them up completely than to succeed with them (thats potentially a reason why 'dumbification MMOs' aka DB request for persistent singleplayer only MMO are the standard, not real things with realtime interactions)