MMO Architecture: Source of truth, Dataflows, I/O bottlenecks and how to solve them

More on MMO Architecture:
- MMO Architecture: client connections, sockets, threads and connection-oriented servers

By certain absurdities of life that only someone whose hobby perfectly aligns with his job can understand, lately I’ve been involved in the design and architecture of an MMO game.

As much as it may seem that such an application fits perfectly in what we would unconsciously consider “distributed architectures“, the specific details (small and large) of this kind of solutions turn what, for any capable engineer would be a simple design process into a headache of biblical proportions.