Phantasmal Site > Phantasmal Tutorials > Administration > Inspecting Your MUD

Inspecting Your Phantasmal-based MUD

Now that you've got your MUD set up, there's a lot to do and a lot to learn. Let's see some of what we can see.

The most important thing you can learn is the online help command. This document assumes you're logged in with an admin account. Just type "help" by itself and you should see some builder help. If you don't see anything about building or administration, your character isn't actually an administrator yet, or you're using the wrong character.

As a player you probably tried the who command to show you who was on. The more powerful %who (also called %people) command will show you everybody you're allowed to see, and will show you their IP addresses as well. Give it a try. Just type it by itself on the command line.

A holdover from the Kernel MUDlib is the %status command. You'll find that it shows you a lot of stuff with very little explanation. It may look a bit like this:

                                          Server:       DGD 1.2.55
------------ Swap device -------------
sectors:       1394 /      2048 ( 68%)    Start time:   Mar 14 07:17:17 2003
sector size:   0.5K            
swap average:  0.21, 0.09                 Uptime:       2 days, 04:39:28

--------------- Memory ---------------    ------------ Callouts ------------
static:      132544 /    256380 ( 52%)    short term:       2         (100%)
dynamic:     732428 /   1044480 ( 70%) +  long term:        0         (  0%) +
             864972 /   1300860 ( 66%)                      2 /   100 (  2%)

Objects:        205 /       500 ( 41%)    Connections:      1 /    40 (  2%)

The online help isn't very helpful about this one -- it's low level nitty-gritty details. So let's hit what's here.

The sector size is how big a given DGD swap sector is. In the listing above, it's 0.5K, or 512 bytes. In the example, 1394 of them are being used (that's just under 700K in size), or 68% of the available sectors. You can change how many are available in the configuration file you set up for phantasmal, called "phantasmal.dgd". You may need to increase it periodically as your MUD grows.

The swap average describes the current swapping behavior and how many objects are being swapped out to disk. Don't worry too much about this until your machine makes chugga-chugga-chugga noises. Even then, you probably mainly just need more sectors available on disk and in memory.

The memory statistics, listed as static and dynamic, are things that DGD will ordinarily handle pretty well for itself. If you get serious weirdness here, you can e-mail the DGD mailing list and Dworkin, the author of DGD, can probably help you out.

The start time is pretty self-explanatory. It should be when you started the MUD. The uptime is how long it's been running. The "server" entry is what version of DGD you're running. The number of connections (1/40 above) is how many current connections you have to your MUD (1 above) and how many you can have at most (40 above).

The number of objects is the number of compiled or cloned objects are currently active in the MUD, and how many it can have at maximum. If the percentage of used objects gets too large, you can increase the available number in "phantasmal.dgd". The bigger your MUD gets, the more objects it's likely to need. If you need to reduce this in some other way you can use more LWOs in your MUDLib -- they live in other objects' memory space so they don't count against this total.

The maximum number of call_outs is also set in "phantasmal.dgd". It's the number of pending uses of the call_out() kernel function you can make before it decides you can't have any more. There are many ways to avoid having too many of these. Phantasmal, for instance, uses something it calls a TimeD to handle the call_outs and call many functions from each single call_out instance.

Now you know the basics of monitoring your MUD's health and activity. Read more tutorials, go ahead and build up your MUD some more, and release it on an unsuspecting public!