Well FWIW, I simply do not trust chats like Mudchat which as far as I can make out was running on the www server. We have a web server working hard and IMO never completely stable so we add to its tasks delivering pages every second or so to however many users are in the chat - lets say 20 people and a refresh of 2 seconds - we have added 720 page requests per minute to the already struggling server. On top of that, every server variable (who is who and so many lines of what has been said) in the web server space.

I think if I had to run one like that (and they do have compatibility advantages over something like the java folk chat) and had to do it on the same machine and had control enough to do it, I think I'd have a seperate instance of the server running on a different port (eg www.mudcat.org/chat.cfm:8080). It may or may not work but at least that way if something happened on chat that crashed that server there could be a chance the other server stayed up.