Quote:Who in their right mind would choose Windows as a game server? If nothing else, it's a waste of money.

EverQuest was ran in Windows NT servers AFAICR (they shipped before W2k, even). Also, all of the Xbox Live! infrastructure runs on Windows, and that seems to scale pretty well ;-)

It is entirely possible to run servers on Windows, and the cost of Windows is not the major cost there, compared to everything else that goes into running a real data center.

That being said, personally I have better experiences from Linux servers than Windows servers, so that's probably what I'd choose, but there are cases that could sway me.

Finally, when it comes to efficient I/O, you have to tip your hat to Microsoft in the .NET framework. The BeginRead()/IAsyncCallback/EndRead() API is easy to use, and it maps very well to I/O completion ports, which are the high-efficiency construct of the NT kernel.

Meanwhile, UNIX has been bogged down in thinking about signals, and that in turns leads to some confusion between threads and processes, which actually makes highly parallel I/O servicing more annoying on UNIX than Windows.

You may want to discount the library availability aspect somewhat as you would be using the Python at a high level (because its slow -- 20X slower than C last I saw) and interfacing with other chunks of your code in C++/other compiled performance languages which do the grunt work efficiently. That other code more likely needs the broad library support.

Interface interactions and animation scripting on the client side, high level game logic on the server side are usually bulky but of minimal complexity and which change/are reworked alot -- requiring the 'scripting' paradigm.