Also, any idea on how many people could be on a single dedicated server this way at one time before the server gets maxed out?

Completely unknown with the information you've given us. For example, the number of people who could use a single server if it was a P200 with 64Mb is completely different to the number of ppl who would saturate a 6 CPU, 2Gb E450. (you mention you use unix.)

One tip, mod_perl keeps database connections open. So the pain and suffering yours scripts go thru' to open a db-handle is done only once.

In this situation where you data must not be volatile (ie you should be able to recover after a machine failure) I think a database would be your best answer IMO. If tuned correctly, most of the data would be in memory, and the db engine will flush it when it needs to.

Instead of fragmenting your application into 100's of scripts check out CGI::Application.

In reply to Re: speeding up multi-player game with shared memory or MySQL by Ryszard
in thread speeding up multi-player game with shared memory or MySQL by dev2000

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