Working on a php based easy to expand socket server for flash, was just wondering if there was some interest out there for such a thing, just trying to gauge how much time I should really spend making it easy to use beyond my current needs.

basic server is completed, works with a demo chatroom I have, flash and sockets are sweet, beat the hell out of refresh based chat rooms

Hi cyberlot,

That sounds very interesting. Do you have a demo available? I just wrote a socket sever in perl for www.gurusnetwork.com: www.gurusnetwork.com/chat/ Steve @ GN did the Flash front end.

I'd like to see one implemented in php though. How is the server load with the php server?

~Charlie

web1.creativetwist.com/chat/

Is a basic example ( the chat room came from a Flash MX Actionscripting, Its extremely basic, my own is not done at the moment, im just using it to test my socket server as I want it to work with all basic socket server flash, not just my own)

Its running of my php socket server..

I spammed my on script with a 300 new lines of data at a time and was only able to get it to use around 2% of a 450Mhz cpu and its currently using only 2237 bytes of memory so the basic version is nice ( compared to the java version I was playing with before I did my own )

As I start adding in features like password authentication Im sure that will go up some, But I plan on making it 100% module, so items you do not use will not be loaded, hence the overhead will stay down

Thanks for the link. That's pretty much what we did with the perl socket over at the Gurus Network. The load on the server is about the same too, much lighter than a java chat server.

I haven't worked with PHP much, are you doing anything special to daeomize your socket server? For the perl server, I just fork the process a couple of times and send STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR to /dev/null for now.

One of the problems that we ran into was the client slowing down after it accumulated *several* lines of data in the chat window. It wasn’t until we had a lot of people in the chat room chatting away that we noticed it. Have you encountered this yet? If so, have you found a solution? For now, we added a button to the client to clear the text when it slows down.

Nice work! Post more details as you progress. I'd like to see how it turns out.

Regards,
Charlie

This version doesnt do any forking at all. Any errors get logged for me to review.

As to that issue, How do you write the information to the windor, If your storing the information in any fashion in the flash it will slow down, make sure your just writing the data and releasing it.