Game practices

One database connection per player? That's not going to scale at all. You'll hose the database performance after a hundred connections or so.

Better is to have a single game server program which has one database connection and handles all the game logic, and synchronizes to the database via that single connection. Don't put game logic in your data layer if you can avoid it.

Also, one thread per connected client (much less one thread per packet?!) is never going to work out. You should have a thread pool with roughly twice as many software threads as hardware threads available on the machine, and use IOCP to handle the sockets. Pass this data into separate threads to do the game logic, i.e. don't do heavy duty logic in your network processing threads, or you will bottleneck your network traffic.


Please be advised that what you want is highly difficult even for domain experts. 1000 players on a single server will require a lot of care and discipline, and it's very easy to make mistakes or bad design decisions that will cause your scalability to plunge into the toilet. I recommend starting with something simpler to learn the basics of socket programming (say, 16 players or so) and then work your way up from there.

Letting clients connect to database is a recipe for security problems (even if the performance can do it.) You always want an application/game/web/somekindof-server to be between the client's connection and the database, to enforce rules for example.
Using a thread per client (or, worse, per packet,) is a recipe for synchronization problems and lots of wasted machine resources. On clients, there's only one connection, so only the main thread is needed. On the server, there are thousands of connections, so thousands of threads will perform poorly. Instead use evented I/O (Linux) or overlapped I/O (Windows) on the sockets. Or use boost::asio for an easy wrapper.
I suggest you first read the content in the FAQ for this forum. If you then have questions, please come back and ask specific questions, like "I'm trying to do X using call Y, and expect to see Z but instead I see W," and we'll be much better able to answer your questions.
By the way: a single thread on a single server will handle 1,000 connections just fine, if the game is simple.