I wonder if Firebase's performance (latency, throughput) is good enough to be used real-time MMO games online.
Could someone with enough knowledge share their opinions on this?
Can Firebase be used instead of socket for real time games?
Short answer is NO: with firebase you'll get client synchronised after a couple of 100 of milliseconds. You may also find consuming to much network traffic with would make firebase prohibitively expensive.
Related
I want to create a webrtc broadcasting demo
https://webrtc-experiment.appspot.com/socket.io/
here i have a one problem broadcaster have huge bandwidth when connect 10+ user because it use peer to peer connection so it use upload bandwidth like this
Total upload bandwith = number of user * ( 30 kb approximate to upload 1 video)
so i want to develop like this
http://bloggeek.me/webrtc-multipoint-small-groups
how to i develop multipoint webrtc using minimum bandwidth ?
While your thought of using WebRTC in a small group multipoint manner, this comes with a lot of complexity and reliability issues. Most WebRTC apps that relay through peers tend to be not so reliable in my experience. In concept it's a great idea, but I haven't seen any solid practical applications. The most reliable implementations of scalable WebRTC broadcasts tends to use a server in the middle. You can use something like Janus, but I prefer Kurento which is open source. There is also a platform called OpenVidu that sits on top of Kurento if you don't want to have to get into the nuts and bolts of how things works, but is less customize-able. You can even record, transcode and process the video in real time.
Hey all,
I'm an iPhone developer looking for a simple, but effective way to host multiplayer games. I've been able to create multiplayer games over local WIFI and Bluetooth, but connecting accross the internet has always been something I've wanted to do but never really been sure how.
My question is 2 fold: Is the performance difference between a hosted server and a client to client connection that much better to make a hosted server worth it?
And secondly, if that is true...is there any kind of hosting provider that won't charge hundreds a month? I currently have a $5/mo website plan which definitely doesn't allow that.
Thanks so much!
-Luke
Your parameters are fairly vague, so I will give you my standard "Answer for a client who may know how to specify based on my broad picture" answer :
Up front, you cannot beat wifi speeds with internet speeds... you can sometimes beat bluetooth with internet speeds. :)
There are a multitude of online games which pass large amounts of state information to multiple clients, so yes, client<->server<->client communication is doable and very effective, performance-wise...
As for cost... That depends on the amount of subscribers and the amount of data to be passed to them/received from them.
I'm developing an application where, to satisfy the performance requirements, tuning of low-level network stuff (such as TCP window size etc) seems to be required.
I found the magnitude of my knowledge to be a bit better than "there's TCP and there's UDP", which is far from enough for this task.
What resources might I study to get a better knowledge of which aspects of TCP influence which performance characteristics in which usage scenarios (for example, how to decrease latency while transmitting 100kb packets to 1000 clients simultaneously on a 10gbit LAN), etc.?
What tools might help me? (I already know about Wireshark, but most probably I am not using it to its full potential)
First understand what you're doing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol
http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_TCPWindowSizeAdjustmentandFlowControl.htm
Then understand how to look at what you're about to change:
http://www.wireshark.org/
http://wiki.wireshark.org/TCP_Analyze_Sequence_Numbers
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=983b941d-06cb-4658-b7f6-3088333d062f&displaylang=en
Then understand how to change things:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms819736.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wndp/archive/2007/07/05/receive-window-auto-tuning-on-vista.aspx
Since you're currently on a windows platform and you mention that you're "developing an application"... You probably also want to know about I/O Completion Ports and how you maximise data flow whilst conserving server resources using write completion driven flow control. I've written about these quite a bit and the last link is a link to my free high performance C++ client/server framework which may give you some pointers as to how to use IOCP efficiently.
http://www.lenholgate.com/blog/2005/11/windows-tcpip-server-performance.html
http://www.lenholgate.com/blog/2008/07/write-completion-flow-control.html
http://www.serverframework.com/products---the-free-framework.html
And google is your friend...
My web application requires as little lag as possible. I have tried hosting it on a dedicated server, but users on the other side of world have complained about latency issues.
So I am considering using CDN or Amazon services.... would either help resolve this?
The application uses a lot of AJAX, so latency can be an issue.
Amazon's Cloudfront, part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) that you can purchase, is a CDN (Content Delivery Network) -- so asking whether to use Amazon or "a CDN" strikes me as a weird question, akin to asking whether you should drink Coke or "a soda" (given that Coke is "a soda"). Rather you should ask "should I use Amazon or another CDN?" just like you'd ask "should I drink Coke or another soda?".
Your decision among CDNs must be based on many parameters - cost, reliability, convenience, speed, and so forth. Unfortunately I have no first-hand experience of CloudFront; however, on paper, it seems particularly simple to use (especially if you're already using other AWS components, since getting data e.g. from S3 to CloudFront is fast and cheap indeed;-), and reasonably priced (based on usage). But I have no experience about its uptime record or delivery speed.
A content delivery network is a great idea to speed up delivery of static content (images, javascript, etc). You could even use this in combination with a dedicated server if you want.
You may also consider using a tool such as YSlow to analyze what may be causing your latency issues.
A CDN will only improve the performance of your static content -- if your Ajax code requires active content, then it won't help for that.
Amazon AWS might help, but it depends on the details of your application. Amazon isn't particularly well-known for delivering a low-latency solution.
Most apps that require low latency end up addressing the issue from many directions. A combination of a CDN and dedicated servers is certainly one approach. One key there is choosing the right data center for your servers (a low-latency hub).
In case it might help, I wrote a book about this subject: Ultra-Fast ASP.NET, which includes a discussion of client-side issues, hardware infrastructure, CDNs, caching, and many other issues that can impact latency.
I have been doing some catching up lately by reading about cloud hosting.
For a client that has about the same characteristics as StackOverflow (Windows stack, same amount of visitors), I need to set up a hosting environment. Stackoverflow went from renting to buying.
The question is why didn't they choose cloud hosting?
Since Stackoverflow doesn't use any weird stuff that needs to run on a dedicated server and supposedly cloud hosting is 'the' solution, why not use it?
By getting answers to this question I hope to be able to make a weighted decision myself.
I honestly do not know why SO runs like it does, on privately owned servers.
However, I can assume why a website would prefer this:
Maintainability - when things DO go wrong, you want to be hands-on on the problem, and solve it as quickly as possible, without needing to count on some third-party. Of course the downside is that you need to be available 24/7 to handle these problems.
Scalability - Cloud hosting (or any external hosting, for that matter) is very convenient for a small to medium-sized site. And most of the hosting providers today do give you the option to start small (shared hosting for example) and grow to private servers/VPN/etc... But if you truly believe you will need that extra growth space, you might want to count only on your own infrastructure.
Full Control - with your own servers, you are never bound to any restrictions or limitations a hosting service might impose on you. Run whatever you want, hog your CPU or your RAM, whatever. It's your server. Many hosting providers do not give you this freedom (unless you pay up, of course :) )
Again, this is a cost-effectiveness issue, and each business will handle it differently.
I think this might be a big reason why:
Cloud databases are typically more
limited in functionality than their
local counterparts. App Engine returns
up to 1000 results. SimpleDB times out
within 5 seconds. Joining records from
two tables in a single query breaks
databases optimized for scale. App
Engine offers specialized storage and
query types such as geographical
coordinates.
The database layer of a cloud instance
can be abstracted as a separate
best-of-breed layer within a cloud
stack but developers are most likely
to use the local solution for both its
speed and simplicity.
From Niall Kennedy
Obviously I cannot say for StackOverflow, but I have a few clients that went the "cloud hosting" route. All of which are now frantically trying to get off of the cloud.
In a lot of cases, it just isn't 100% there yet. Limitations in user tracking (passing of requestor's IP address), fluctuating performance due to other load on the cloud, and unknown usage number are just a few of the issues that have came up.
From what I've seen (and this is just based on reading various blogged stories) most of the time the dollar-costs of cloud hosting just don't work out, especially given a little bit of planning or analysis. It's only really valuable for somebody who expects highly fluctuating traffic which defies prediction, or seasonal bursts. I guess in it's infancy it's just not quite competitive enough.
IIRC Jeff and Joel said (in one of the podcasts) that they did actually run the numbers and it didn't work out cloud-favouring.
I think Jeff said in one of the Podcasts that he wanted to learn a lot of things about hosting, and generally has fun doing it. Some headaches aside (see the SO blog), I think it's a great learning experience.
Cloud computing definitely has it's advantages as many of the other answers have noted, but sometimes you just want to be able to control every bit of your server.
I looked into it once for quite a small site. Running a small Amazon instance for a year would cost around £700 + bandwidth costs + S3 storage costs. VPS hosting with similar specs and a decent bandwidth allowance chucked in is around £500. So I think cost has a lot to do with it unless you are going to have fluctuating traffic and lots of it!
I'm sure someone from SO will answer it but "Isn't just more hassle"? Old school hosting is still cheap and unless you got big scalability problems why would you do cloud hosting?