Python speed

[jcm]

Paul Winkler <slinkp23 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> jcm wrote:
>> 
>> Pete Shinners <shredwheat at mediaone.net> wrote:
>> ...
>> 
>> > for doing a MUD, the language speed is not going to have
>> > much noticeable effect, since network speed is far slower
>> > than any of the languages can handle.
>> 
>> This isn't necessarily true.  If you have a lot of objects with state
>> that changes often (wandering monsters, etc), computation-speed can
>> become an issue.

> I still don't see why python wouldn't be up to the job.
> If things are working well but too slowly, it's time to think about
> optimization.

Well, I say this because I've written a mud engine in Python and it's
slow.  Using this engine on a PII 266 running RedHat 6.1, 400
wandering monsters (with nothing else going on in the mud) will peg
the cpu.  In a production mud, you might want to do something
intelligent about wandering monsters (like have them stop wandering if
no players are nearby to save cpu-time), but there will also be lots
else going on.

There might be some clever optimizations that could be made.  Anyway,
my only point was that computation-speed can become an issue.