11–20 of 53 posts
1000 new servers a week is a ridiculous number for this sort of company. Their code must be really, really bad. Anyone who works there care to chime in? Is it all written in ColdFusion or something?
Here's how this adds up to me: - 215M users. - Up to 1000 servers per week. - Say, they've been doing this for 30 weeks. - So they need 1 server for every 7167 users? Is this normal for mmorpg type games? - Are 215M people playing around the clock? I'm just a little baffled by this number.
"...it takes roughly 20,000 computer systems, over a petabyte of storage, and over 4600 people. Using multiple data centers around the world, this works out to a total of 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM."
It doesn't say if that's total or just US (since WoW is hosted by different partners in Asia, last I paid any attention).
1000 new servers a week is a ridiculous number for this sort of company. Their code must be really, really bad. Anyone who works there care to chime in? Is it all written in ColdFusion or something?
"as many as 1,000 servers every week" Really this probably means that one week they added 1,000 but the actual average number is much lower. Makes for a good talking point worded that way!
Here's how this adds up to me: - 215M users. - Up to 1000 servers per week. - Say, they've been doing this for 30 weeks. - So they need 1 server for every 7167 users? Is this normal for mmorpg type games? - Are 215M people playing around the clock? I'm just a little baffled by this number.
Some MMO designers actually really want to bring that number even lower, though lots of other people at game companies are looking at ways to pack more users on each core. But from a designer's perspective, if you typically get less than 1/50 of a CPU slice per user, maybe 1/100, and much of that is taken up by doing basic bookkeeping, it's hard to put in things that even 1990s RPGs took for granted, like NPCs with at least passably interesting AI.
1000 new servers a week is a ridiculous number for this sort of company. Their code must be really, really bad. Anyone who works there care to chime in? Is it all written in ColdFusion or something?
You'd think this stuff could be pretty efficient if done right, defer as much as possible to the flash application. I guess security is an issue if you do to much processing the the flash, probably a lot of servers to just to serve the flash.
1000 servers per week number is not just realistic. I will like to believe the author misspoke otherwise it will take more that Zynga employees just to configure 1000 servers in a week time.
1000 new servers a week is a ridiculous number for this sort of company. Their code must be really, really bad. Anyone who works there care to chime in? Is it all written in ColdFusion or something?
Note that it's not 1000 servers every week, it's up to 1000 servers in a given week. This was likely done to support the launch of a new game, and may factor in server turnover (they're on EC2). That being said, launching 1000 nodes for non-batch jobs is still pretty remarkable.
Also keep in mind interactive multiplayer games with persistent state are different beasts compared to usual web applications. Games are very write heavy and do not cache well.
Here's how this adds up to me: - 215M users. - Up to 1000 servers per week. - Say, they've been doing this for 30 weeks. - So they need 1 server for every 7167 users? Is this normal for mmorpg type games? - Are 215M people playing around the clock? I'm just a little baffled by this number.
7000 users/server is actually pretty high for an MMO, though I don't know how Zynga's MMOs compare to something like World of Warcraft in terms of server resources needed. The numbers being floated around for World of Warcraft are around 75,000 cores for 10m subscribers, or about 133 subscribers per core. Obviously those aren't single-core servers, but it's still under 1k per server. Of course this and the Zynga numb…