Voodoo chat 1.0 review

Voc is a stream-chat engine which is designed to work on high-loaded chat-servers

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Vlad Vostrykh

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Voc is a stream-chat engine which is designed to work on high-loaded chat-servers. It is written in PHP, but uses Perl or C++ for Voc-daemon -- the special program to handle multiple user-connections. With Voc you can make a chat that will serve many conversations simultanously. And it's html-based, so your chatters can use it from almost any browser.
The Voc-engine includes a lot of features so it will be interested not only for a big chat owners.

What's so special about Voc-engine?
There are 2 classes of html-chats. Classic-type, with refreshing messages-window, And stream-type.
Refresh-type is known to everybody, so let's think about streams. What is the common way to introduce such functionality? Webmasters make cgi-script (PHP-script, jsp-srcpt, e.t.c) which checks for new messages every second (2,3...) and prints something to the client. Of course, you need one instance of the script for each client. Now calculate how many data-requests you need to process every second... At least two for each client -- get messages, get users-list.

Also don't forget about memory and CPU usage. For instance, if you have PHP-scripts and PHP is compiled as an Apache-module, be ready to spend 5 Mbytes of memory and 0.1-1% of CPU for each client (only for messages-window).Multiple it to number of users online.
Do you still want to use such scripts?

Is there any solutions? I guess, yes -- try Voodoo chat. It uses Perl- or C++-daemon which processes users-requests to a messages list. And you need just one daemon for all clients. This daemon takes approx. 10 Mbytes of memory for 100 users. CPU usage is also small (of course it depends on your CPU, i.e. for 100 users online it is 0.5% of Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz). Do you see the difference now?

Here are some key features of "VladVostrykh":
Daemon-stream type (recommended)
Classic-type (with refreshes)
PHP-stream script (read text above and use this type only when you have less then 20 simultaneous visitors and cannot use daemon-type)
JavaScript stream-emulation (refreshing hidden frame which just add text to the main message-window)
Themes-support. You can use one of exisitng designes, or easily create your own
rooms
private messages
ignoring
you can enable to use bold, italic, underlined messages
inline images
personal info-page with photo for registered users
avatars
internal mini-mail system
status (online/offline/not available/don't disturb)
web-indicator (see example at the left)
nick & string highlighing for personal messages
anti-flood
messages and ban/unban logging
limits for maximum number of users and maximum number of users from one ip (anti-nick-flooding)
graphical statistic, example
admin-zone to manage the chat
moderator-levels for registered users, so you can give someone permissions to ban/unban users, change rooms-info, edit/delete registered users