i joined little golem about a month ago, and since then there have been started roughly 10000 new games. looking at the forum, the first post i can see is from march 2002 meaning about 40000 games started from march 2002 till april 2003...then 10000 in just over 1 month after that. will the server be able to hold this exponential growth? in a few months time we'll have 50000 games a month. my estimation would be that there will start grosso modo 400000 games between now and may 2004.
50,000 games and nothing seems to be complaining, is this why the pages take 'so long' to load then?
Also, is there a way of getting the pages to load faster by getting my computer to do more work (as in, it knows how to draw the page and all LG has to do is tell it where the new move is kind of thing)
I know nothing about this stuff so sorry if that's a silly idea...
> Also, is there a way of getting the pages to load faster
> by getting my computer to do more work (as in, it knows
> how to draw the page and all LG has to do is tell it
> where the new move is kind of thing)
This could be done by causing the user to download a java applet for each game. Some game servers do this.
The snag is that it restricts who can use the server. WebTV users don't really have computers, so they can't use a server that does this. And some people have java disabled, indeed some companies enforce that java is disbaled on all workstations with web access, so as to be sure of avoiding damaging java applets. By using a straight html interface, LittleGolem maximises its number of potential users.
There are many solutions that can be found to overcome the overload problem. Java applets is one of them. If there are computers where Java is disabled, that can cause no problem. It only means we should allow both options, web and java as a means to connecting to littlegolem. But I think that Richard is the one to decide what solution to choose, whether it's java applets or multiple servers or whatever else.
Anyway, I think that planning ahead is not bad at all. If exponential growth is indeed the case here, it would mean some planning should be made.
Another question to Richard: what database are you using ?
From my experience sites involving java applets or flash are in fact much slower than littlegolem. I would find it sad to abandon the plain html user interface.
If Richard should want to create another client interaction, I would suggest that he keeps the original littlegolem intact and adds the service as a new website, even if the database of games remains the same.
I would tolerate one update: change the aggressive yellow blue and red color scheme :-)
Flash and DHTML are not portable. The current Little Golem has the important advantage of being usable from virtually anything, you just need a GUI browser (well, it excludes Lynx and such, but I don't think that's a problem ;).
Little Golem