Flash Media Server and Smart Fox Benchmarking

Howdy...

If you are looking for a socket server for the multi player game, you don't want to use Flash Media Server...  It's way too expensive for that...  
You should look for Unity or ElectroServer for that...

http://www.moock.org/unity/
http://www.electro-server.com/

CyanBlue

thanks Cyan

For now , we have been playing with those engine first.
We want to compare those engine first  before trying to use other engine.
All we want is all of you who has used those engine , and give me pros and conts

Benchmarking and comparison would be nice

Sorry...  I don't know enough to tell you the specifics on each products...

CyanBlue

Hi teddysetiawan.

I've been using FMS a lot recently, and here are my pros and cons:

Pros:
    - all the hard work is done for you (a few simple function calls is all that's needed to learn)
    - easy to use (once you learn the quirkiness of it's grammar)
    - it provides a very simply interface for streaming audio/video, shared objects, and remote procedure calls
    - server config is done by manipulating a few xml files
    - reasonable amount of security (you can restrict certain IPs/domains, etc.)
    - it come with a pretty administrative utility (to manage virtual servers, users, and licence files)
    - server-side code just uses a modified Actionscript 2 grammar, so you can do anything AS2 can do (including sendAndLoad, for php->mysql interactions)

Cons:
    - LUDICROUSLY OVERPRICED!
        - pricing is connection based, so for every 100 users you want, it'll set you back $4,500 USD
        - although you can download a free version with allows 10 connections with unlimited bandwidth
    - the stock license files eventually only let you have up to 200 connections with unlimited bandwidth, after that if you want more people connected, it
      will restrict the bandwidth for each user
        - I realize that you'll probably want to do this anyway, but to not even give you the option of getting a monstrous server seems kinda dumb
    - it's grammar is even more stupid than the regular AS2 grammar
        - for example, you can't predefine object types in function signatures (eg. myFunc(n:Number) <- NOT ALLOWED ... myFunc(n) <- ALLOWED)
        - fine, but it doesn't even warn you about it at compile time, it just breaks at runtime
        - I was fighting with this stupidity for about 2 days until I discovered it
    - it's only easily ported to Flash (at least I haven't heard of anyone using any other environment with it)

Hope this helps
MuXx

Thanks alot muxxter , so much about FMS ^_^ , thats why I wanna ask it first before I really decide to use it.

Do you also know about smartfoxs server ?

Never used it, sorry.

MuXx

thanks  muxxter
I will wait for a week , if there is no response from others I will give you the credit .

Hmm, upon further inspection of www.smartfoxserver.com, I would say it just looks like a third party replacement for FMS.

The pro version supports everything that FMS pro supports, except it's considerably cheeper. It also looks like it just plugs right into Flash just like FMS.
I haven't used it, so I couldn't tell you about compiler.

Actually, if you're looking for something like that, there's a small group of coders devoted to developing an open source alternative. It's called Red5, and they're slowly getting it up and running. If I had some time on my hands I'd contribute to the project myself.

Check it out:

http://www.osflash.org/red5

MuXx

we are planning to used it for commercial use, we're gonna stick with the engine that has been stabil first.

we are running with time line , perhaps later we consider about red5.

Interesting one that SmartFoxServer is...  Nice find, MuXx...  ;)

I think that will do the very good job as a replacment of the FMS when you are talking about the multi user application, but I just want to mention that SmartFoxServer is only a socket sever nothing else which means that you cannot use it as a full replacement of the FMS...  You cannot record the FLV with SmartFoxServer for example and such will be only done via FMS or Red5...  Other than that, SmartFoxServer would be a good one...  

CyanBlue

We decide it not using FMS , thanks muxx

I see you're right CyanBlue. SmartFoxServer doesn't support audio/video at all. Oh well, I'll just have to start helping the Red5 people out.

Thanks guys
MuXx

I like the idea behind the Red5 alot especially when the FMS pricing is somewhat outrageous...  :(

teddysetiawan...  What's your alternative???

CyanBlue

We have decide not to use FMS and try to compare with smartfoxs vs electro-server , their price is more reasonable then FMS , at this time we are only using socket server for gaming not for audio/video streaming  so I guess it does'nt really need FMS to do that.

The challenge is that 1 FMS system can act like a host to others FMS , where we can put other FMS to another server/place ( we have place in Singapore, Hongkong ,and UK) and we need that, while Smartfoxs and electro-server apparentlly do not support that.They only support more like clustering system.

Ah...  I think I am getting what you are saying and that might be problem if you really need to daisy chain the servers like that...  Don't forget to let us know if you have any update we all can learn from...  ;)

CyanBlue