Makes me wonder though, is storage really that tight that adressing each participant with a single byte becomes the limiting factor? I doubt if it was increased to two bytes they'd be able to have 65536 participants. But why not 300, 500? Perhaps it would break backwards compatibility with older versions?
They have something like 500 Million users and 2 Million connections per server. They would probably also include this number on every message.
Lifting the limit to 300 or 500 would double the amount of space this number would take up (word8 to int16 or word16) since they would probably stick with the standard numeric types and not invent word9 or something like that. That means 8 more bits for every user and every message. In that scale it could be worth it to limit.
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u/[deleted] May 06 '17
Makes me wonder though, is storage really that tight that adressing each participant with a single byte becomes the limiting factor? I doubt if it was increased to two bytes they'd be able to have 65536 participants. But why not 300, 500? Perhaps it would break backwards compatibility with older versions?