[vworld-tech] Some resources for MMOG server development

[Bruce Mitchener]

Brian Hook wrote:
> Right now the biggest factor is that TCP stalls all traffic if 
> anything comes out of order.  It also does not support multichannel 
> communication, so a single lost packet can back up a bunch of 
> unrelated stuff.  There are other issues with how it handles backoff 
> and congestion control, but I don't think those are as important as 
> the reliability mechanism causing problems.

You might find some of the work on DCCP, the Datagram Congestion Control 
Protocol useful.  It isn't ratified yet, and so isn't likely to be 
directly useful in the next year or three[1], but it is good reading 
anyway and might be where things are headed in the future:

   http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/dccp-charter.html
   http://www.icir.org/kohler/dcp/

At the least, they've done a lot of thinking and writing about how to be 
TCP-friendly, how to handle congestion issues, and so on.

There is at least one other thing going through the IETF that is 
interesting in our field of work:

    * Reliable Server Pooling:
      http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/rserpool-charter.html
      http://tdrwww.exp-math.uni-essen.de/dreibholz/rserpool/

  - Bruce

[1]: 
http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/dccp/current/msg00369.html 
and 
http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/dccp/current/msg00371.html