Take the 2-minute tour ×

Let's say I make a client-server application. A simple game for example. Where each client polls the server every half a minute. How many clients is it possible to have before it overlaods a wamp server? Basically how robust is Apache for this kind of stuff? Getting a request, aggregating data from mysql server, and then returning the data in an xml format. What solution should I use for my case? Thank you in advance.

share|improve this question
add comment

closed as too broad by Tom O'Connor Aug 14 '13 at 21:07


1 Answer

That depends a lot on your hardware and also configuration. In my general experience:

  1. SSL drops connections/second by around an order of magnitude.
  2. Worker MPM scales better than Prefork.
  3. More cores improves performance, though non-linearly.

However, instead of polling, you may want to consider a different game architecture. Maybe you want to have the data pushed to the clients instead. That can help with reducing load.

I would say that if you build the game you are building, you may have not chosen the right architecture.

share|improve this answer
Ok thanks, What kind of architecture should I be thinking of? Any websites or articles I should read up on that may help me out? –  stonebold May 29 '10 at 14:05
Maybe you can try to calculate the traffic difference between polling the server and pushing to the client under a specific gaming scenario. That will help you identify if your networking architecture is correct. Then you may also want to consider the amount of data access from the DB. From what I guess, your gaming server will suffer under load. –  sybreon May 30 '10 at 8:40
If you're looking at doing this via HTTP you should be looking at AJAX –  Chris Thorpe Jul 10 '10 at 1:28
I'd probably try to find a way to use XMPP and pub/sub. –  Tom O'Connor Nov 28 '10 at 2:26
add comment