[cod] shared base directory?

[James Kreuziger]

Well, I think you need to narrow down how you are setup to run from one
base directory 
a bit more before you can be sure there would be any measureable
performance improvements.  
I run a number of UNIX based machines (Linux and Solaris) at work.  I'll
almost always 
run multiple copies of software from from one base directory.  Notice I
said almost always.  
What situations will I not?

1) Software licensing - Some stuff I need to have 1 physical copy for
each user or machine.  
No real performance benefit, just lawsuit avoidance benefit.  Much more
of a pain to administer.

2) Very large binary on a NFS volume with a crowded network and a large
number of users - If I 
have a binary that is 300MB in size and need to have multiple machines
(hence the NFS) and 
multiple users on those machines AND a crowded network, I'd rethink the
situation.  All those 
things put together could spell doom for users trying to start an app in
a reasonable period of 
time.  Not to mention that if the app also had to use network bandwidth
after it started running, 
all the NFS traffic could affect performance. NFS doesn't scale well
(especially on Linux), and 
it's performance tends to drop pretty rapidly.

I'm sure I can come up with others, but these are the only real
situations I've had to address.  
How does this relate to memory usage improvements?  Well, the only way I
can think is if you 
have a REAL slow underpowered (CPU), minimum memory, slow harddrive,
10MB Ethernet machine acting 
as an NFS server to share the one base directory.  On top of that, have
2000 client machines trying to access said base directory at the same
time.  Then you could have memory usage problems on the machine that has
the base directory.

Now on a modern gaming server, the only way to determine if you have
measurable improvement in memory 
usage in the situation you describe would be to test it out.  My guess
is that you will find no 
difference between the 2 setups.  

-Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: luke at techfreak.org [mailto:luke at techfreak.org] 
Sent: Saturday, April 10, 2004 5:24 AM
To: cod at icculus.org
Subject: [cod] shared base directory?


Hey all,

I'm wondering if there are 'proven' performance gains to running
multiple instances of COD (or any Q3 engine game) from one base
directory, with config files and custom .pk3 files in several user
directories.

I know you can do this, and that some people feel its easier to manage.
But, Im wondering if there are memory usage improvments in doing it this
way as opposed to loading a complete copy of the game into each users
directory.

thoughts?

Luke