When booting up the MUD engine with only my two zones (the Thri-Kreen hometown and the Kobold Village), Basternae 3 takes up 22,256 kilobytes of RAM.

That somehow manages to drop to 20,096 kilobytes of RAM when I connect with a single player.  I think it was probably just timed to coincide with a garbage collection.  Moving around for a while brings it back up to 20,500.

A boot up with no zones loaded starts at 22,116 kilobytes of RAM.

So, at this point the MUD engine takes about 22 megabytes of RAM plus however many zones are loaded.  I can’t imagine players taking more than 8 kilobytes, and with zones taking up about 1 megabyte per 3000 rooms, we’ve got plenty of room to grow.

With 32 megabytes available, we could support:

27,000 rooms
128 simultaneous players

No problem.

The entry-level VPN servers I’ve been looking at start at 256, but that’s for OS plus applications.  It’ll be running Linux so I’ll have about 128 megs for OS and 128 for apps.  We could run 300,000 rooms and nearly 800 players before needing to upgrade.

I definitely don’t miss the “bad old days”.  When I first started writing MUD code it was normal to only have 32 MB in an entire system.