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Here's a recent Raft story from when I was trying to learn how to use it. I'm working on coding a multiplayer io game for fun. One key part was that it needs re

Here's a recent Raft story from when I was trying to learn how to use it. I'm working on coding a multiplayer io game for fun. One key part was that it needs replication of game state so that live games can fail over if one of the servers crashes or is restarted. I was like, "wait, that's what raft does, and my game state is already a state machine ... let's do this thing". I then ended up putting my entire game state into raft, and even abused it as a generic pubsub engine. It was fun, and it worked, and was actually not hard to setup using the Rust implementation. Then when I was done, I realized how pathological it was to put literally all game state and every single event into Raft, so decided to stop indulging myself by having fun and trying to hack Raft into an unintended use case, and just used Redis for game state and pubsub. I never load tested the Raft implementation, but once I do have some perf testing tools, I'd be interesting to run the Raft code vs. Redis comparison to see how throughput differs. For this use case, at some point Raft should fall over while Redis would be chugging along.

chucky_z 1y ago
It depends!!! If you do something like Consul does where you cram “events” into a radix tree that you send as one big batch it should scale quite well. I wouldn’t expect batched Redis performance but it should be within 70-80% of it in my guess.
blast 1y ago
> I'm working on coding a multiplayer io game for fun. I know what a multiplayer game is, but what's a multiplayer io game? (not being snarky, i loved your comment)
- lopatin 1y ago
  It's just a browser based multi-player game with a .io TLD. Hope to make a Show HN soon :)
- ChadNauseam 1y ago
  There's a trend of "io games" which are so named because the first one was hosted on a site called "agar.io". then was followed by slither.io and so on. They are characterized by a few distinctive qualities: they're entirely browser-based, players are instantly dropped into a big lobby with tons of other players, they typically have simplistic graphics (e.g. powered by canvas), they have no long-term progression (once you die you restart from the beginning), and they have some kind of leaderboard where you can see the players in your shard that have progressed the farthest since the last time they died.

chucky_z 1y ago

It depends!!! If you do something like Consul does where you cram “events” into a radix tree that you send as one big batch it should scale quite well. I wouldn’t expect batched Redis performance but it should be within 70-80% of it in my guess.

blast 1y ago

> I'm working on coding a multiplayer io game for fun. I know what a multiplayer game is, but what's a multiplayer io game? (not being snarky, i loved your comment)

lopatin 1y ago
It's just a browser based multi-player game with a .io TLD. Hope to make a Show HN soon :)
ChadNauseam 1y ago
There's a trend of "io games" which are so named because the first one was hosted on a site called "agar.io". then was followed by slither.io and so on. They are characterized by a few distinctive qualities: they're entirely browser-based, players are instantly dropped into a big lobby with tons of other players, they typically have simplistic graphics (e.g. powered by canvas), they have no long-term progression (once you die you restart from the beginning), and they have some kind of leaderboard where you can see the players in your shard that have progressed the farthest since the last time they died.