OK,

As you may or may not know were working on a massive online edu program with A5 so there will be hordes of users on per server. My boss asked me about user counts per server and what limit should we stay within per server. So Im kinda asking you all what you think a nice limit will be per server. We are buying some NICE servers so spec wise they will be top. There isn't any fighting, shooting and so forth, moreless a chatting enviroment (walking, waving, so forth) saying that, per sever what limit should I make the max number of users per server?

Thanks for your input,
Cedric

Depends on your level and gameplay, but a good rule of thumb is 25..50 players per server. Maybe more if only chatting and slow walking.

I think EverQuest has gotten to the point where they can handle 300 people in a zone (1 physical machine). Not sure but I believe Dark Age of Camelot has 4 boxes per server and a limit of 3000 people per server (1000 on each box and then a database?). Anarchy Online is probably similar, 200-300 actual users per physical box maximum.

Windows machines start to choke if you have more than 1000 tcpip connections concurently (in my experience) AND this is only if you have multi-cpu machines w/ 2 megs of cache. Otherwise the max is probably 200-300.