snakes.run is a massively multiplayer snake game that uses the Secure Snake Home (SSH) protocol. It can render 100M pixels a second.

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A developer built a massively multiplayer snake game playable over SSH, detailing three core engineering challenges: terminal display using Unicode block elements to achieve two pixels per character, bandwidth optimization from ~35 KB/s down to ~2.5 KB/s through stateful cell-diffing rendering and 4-bit color tracking, and CPU performance improvements achieving a 25x speedup. Key wins included replacing lipgloss with hand-rolled string functions, pre-allocating all string caches to reduce GC pressure from 15% to 0.5%, and forking Go's crypto library to strip OpenSSH keystroke timing obfuscation packets that were flooding the server. The result supports ~2,500 concurrent users rendering over 100 million pixels per second.

snakes.run: rendering 100M pixels a second over ssh · eieio.games

snakes.run: rendering 100M pixels a second over ssh