Photon server on Linux ??
Hi,
I was wondering if anyone ever tried to run a Photon instance on a Linux server ?
Or ... Do you have any plan to make a Linux version of your great piece of software ?
Photon will be our sockect server of choice (after trying SFS ...) but running on Linux is mandatory for anything serverside in our projects.
Cheers,
Arnaud
I was wondering if anyone ever tried to run a Photon instance on a Linux server ?
Or ... Do you have any plan to make a Linux version of your great piece of software ?
Photon will be our sockect server of choice (after trying SFS ...) but running on Linux is mandatory for anything serverside in our projects.
Cheers,
Arnaud
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Comments
There will be a Linux version eventually, but when is undetermined.
Any news on a Linux based Photon server?
- Support for Linux-based servers (native Core & Mono Runtime)
- Windows Server and Linux will be preferred platforms
- Existing apps will run on Windows or Linux with no or minor code changes
We did a port of Photon to a pure .NET/C# version - we will probably release it as a "Photon Express" in July/August. This version runs on Linux/OSX & Windows.
What is the difference between the impending Photon Express release and the full Photon on Linux?
"Photon Express" is a pure managed port of Photon supporting UDP and TCP.
- FYI: The CLR socket performance is 5-10 times better than Mono
"Photon Linux" as the same architecture "Photon Windows" - this allows much more CCUs than the pure managed version:
a) native core (C/C++) doing the heavy lifting of RUDP/eNet
b) CLR/Mono for the business logic
just what Iam waiting for
Let me ask a more direct question: I am doing Unity 3D front-end development, and I would like to investigate Photon as the backend for my MMO — will Photon Express be adequate for that kind of initial investigation (if not full deployment)?
Photon can easily handle and mmo, but this is also up to the system you build. It needs to be well designed and at least you will need to have some knowledge about networks/high ccu systems. But the Server itself is definitely capable of handling this.
"pure managed port" means that the whole server is written in C#: When running it with mono it uses the Mono sockets, when running with .NET it uses the .NET sockets.
Photon Express skips a few networking features and is not suitable for production stage, just for development.
Photon Linux will have just like the standard Photon an unmanaged core and it will host Mono for the business logic. That version will be a 1:1 port of Photon (not express).
I mean I don't clearly understand when should anyone use it if he already has non-Express version of Photon.
thanks,
Slav
Chris
So now that it is late August... what can you tell us about Photon Express and/or Photon on Linux?
For the time being, we decided against a linux build and put our engery into a hosted service, which is about to launch soon. Self-hosting will stay but the option to let us host your server in an efficient way should solve more problems than a linux port which (in best case) has the same cost per user.
Sorry for the bad news for linux. This project is delayed.
Not for reasons of using it in production environment, but for easier and more performant development with developers on the OSX side or also if one has to present something with an OSX Machine & Unity in an environment without internet where its otherwise simply impossible to do it (happened in the past unhappily)
If it was naturally cancelled in an early form it makes no sense to persuade it just for this purpose.
On OSX, Photon runs with (e.g.) Parallels.
But thats what I expected, that its buggy and wouldn't work well.
Can't comment on the effort "supporting" would have naturally, even when it has no performance critical aspect that would need to be present, thats why I would only support such a motion if it comes as "little effort side product" as I want you guys to focus the available resources in the real thing
Right now it's not 100% feature complete, specifically the new s2s functionality is missing and we would need to retest with the new mono versions and the new OSX.
I expect that Photon Express will require a lot of support / testing / fixing, just because we get a different behavior under every OS and MONO version.
Im wondering is there any news or updates on making Photon server for Linux?
As for me i would prefer to have Linux machine as i can have just command line to run server, no GUI and other stuff. So i would be able to squeeze as much performance as possible from machine, windows so far taking much more resources for it fanciness and GUI then Linux.
To be honest im very surprised that Photon pramerly was oriented for windows as all serious servers (DB, WEB, games etc) usually hosted from Linux as it more stably and eat less resources for OS internal management.
1. Windows servers offers a non visual, shell based environment too
2. AThe additional performance you can squeeze out is minimal (if present at all anymore with Windows Server 2012 - I doubt it unless you custom modify and highly use case optimize your linux installation from my own experience with the previous generation already) compared to the major performance slice you lose from the Mono vs MS .NET 4.5 switch unluckily.
Mono 3.x might finally even the field basing on Xamarins general progress and the GC 2.10.x progress made, but its just not there yet as per Q1 2013. But it might become a field that at least could be considered to be looked into again to be prepared for later / late 2013 after Mono 2.6 and 2.8 last year with their GC were definitely no option as the GC was not remotely capable of doing its job fine in a highly concurrent setup.
Back when Photon started, Mono was a running gag in the developer community when it came to production usage, with only few betting on it (Mono 1.x with a GC that was slower than MS .NET 1.0 one basically with major memory leaks), so even with the whole worlds love poured into Linux and a 7 figure amount of money to back that love up, it would not have been an option.
However, we don't have any plans to support Photon on Linux at the moment.
Our current focus is to make Photon available for as many client platforms as possible, but we'll stick with Windows for the server side.The amount of work that would be required to build a Linux version with equal stability and performance as the Windows version is immense, and we feel that it is just not worth the effort - we rather want to spend our time on other features we consider more useful. Sorry that I can not give "better" news.
Given that Windows servers nowadays cost a few bucks more than Linux ones, which in contrast of the 3-4+ figure monthly costs for the hardware and traffic itself is ignorable, I fully understand and support any decision that gets me a more stable and performant environment to work with as thats what counts to me, my clients and in the very end all our customers.
Im still at the beginning of Photon researching and i like it so far no matter of the OS the server side would hosted from. And im fully supporting your motivation to push client sides to make it available for various platforms. very good work! my first experience to write server from scratch was half successful, so i decide better spend money on good product rather then spend 7 years of learning how to write scale-able servers
I am also very thankful for indie licensing schema, thank you for supporting indie developers and putting adequate prices
Good luck with development!
For a real port of Photon to Linux the Mono performance isn't that critical like for the Express version, as the low-levelcode, thats actual performance-relevant, is written in C++, anyway, while only the not performance critical high level stuff is written in C#.
However performance test results, when prototyping the full C# way have been that disappointing with Mono, that we do not even consider it an option for development only usage, let alone live servers, so we have discontinued this approach.
That leaves the option of porting Photons C++ core code to Linux. This code has been highly optimized for nearly two decades to achieve maximum speed and a lot of these optimizations are very windows specific.
We would either loose most of the performance advantages of Photon on Linux or have to put in a real lot of time and money to archieve a similar performance on Linux.
Thats why we currently can't offer a Linux version of the Photon server: With the developer ressources that we would have to invest therefor we can just add so many cool features in the meantime instead.
Justin
I also agree with dreamora. The performance argument regarding windows vs Linux is somewhat dated and moot in 2015. The only thing Linux has going for it is Licensing. Currently, if I have a multi player game that runs on 5 servers, I need to purchase 5 licenses, which can be a bit pricy when compared to Linux. However, the cloud is mitigating this to some degree, as long as you don't need to customize the server. If you need to write your own server, like me, then there is always Azure, AWS, or even self hosting if you have the resources to support it.
Is there any updates regarding linux distribution of photon server ? As I can see it was promised back in 2011...
Best regards,
Vitaliy
best,
Ilya