Abstract:
The design of online game servers presents many challenges. Like other
massive online systems (web servers, application servers, etc.), online
game servers require scalability, durability, data consistency, and
other enterprise features. Unlike many online systems, game servers also
have very specific demands around latency, fairness, and
locality--issues important to business and database systems, but not
usually in a manner so commingled with application logic. Project
Darkstar is a research effort at Sun Microsystems to build a server
platform that meets these requirements while providing a very simple
interface for game developers to program their server-side logic. This
talk covers the basic features and design goals of Darkstar, and picks a
couple of specific systems problems to highlight some of the challenges
in game systems and how they are addressed in the Darkstar platform.