How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle
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How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle
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Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle
#2It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? Oh, I guess it's 100% utilization, not 100% load. As in, they don't spin down servers to save power during off-hours I guess.
The time dilation is a neat solution to the server load problem, but it's sooo annoying as a player. In beta, it was interesting to watch the entire game desync and grind to a halt, but we could still chat and look around. Interesting, but frustrating.
Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle
#3It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? Oh, I guess it's 100% utilization, not 100% load. As in, they don't spin down servers to save power during off-hours I guess. The time dilation is a neat solution to the server load problem, but it's sooo annoying as a player…
>It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time?
I wasn't sure how to interpret that either.
I've always been a bit surprised that the the backend systems for these MMOs aren't a bit more flexible. Though, EvE did launch nearly 10 years ago and it has never had a huge number of subscribers.
I have no idea whether more recent games have solved these problems.
Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle
#4It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? Oh, I guess it's 100% utilization, not 100% load. As in, they don't spin down servers to save power during off-hours I guess. The time dilation is a neat solution to the server load problem, but it's sooo annoying as a player…
>It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? I wasn't sure how to interpret that either. I've always been a bit surprised that the the backend systems for these MMOs aren't a bit more flexible. Though, EvE did launch nearly 10 years ago and it has never had a huge numb…
I can't think of any games that deal with PVP on this scale either.
Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle
#5It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? Oh, I guess it's 100% utilization, not 100% load. As in, they don't spin down servers to save power during off-hours I guess. The time dilation is a neat solution to the server load problem, but it's sooo annoying as a player…
>It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? I wasn't sure how to interpret that either. I've always been a bit surprised that the the backend systems for these MMOs aren't a bit more flexible. Though, EvE did launch nearly 10 years ago and it has never had a huge numb…
I wouldn't call over 400,000 players '[not] a huge number'. It's the 2nd or 3rd most popular paid-subscription MMO.
Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle
#6It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? Oh, I guess it's 100% utilization, not 100% load. As in, they don't spin down servers to save power during off-hours I guess. The time dilation is a neat solution to the server load problem, but it's sooo annoying as a player…
If memory serves, I believe that they mean that the servers run at 100% capacity, not 100% load ie. CCP does not throttle back system resources during periods of light use.
Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle
#7It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? Oh, I guess it's 100% utilization, not 100% load. As in, they don't spin down servers to save power during off-hours I guess. The time dilation is a neat solution to the server load problem, but it's sooo annoying as a player…
>It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? I wasn't sure how to interpret that either. I've always been a bit surprised that the the backend systems for these MMOs aren't a bit more flexible. Though, EvE did launch nearly 10 years ago and it has never had a huge numb…
I have no idea whether more recent games have solved these problems.
Most games solve this problem with completely separate servers and population caps. I know in Guild Wars 2 they actually stop displaying players past a certain number to improve performance. This works fine in calm areas like cities, but in PvP it causes issues with being killed by "invisible" groups that the game fails to load in time.
I may be remembering incorrectly, but last I remember reading CCP was basically in uncharted territory on the tech front as far as EVE Online is concerned. No other game developer has even tried to tackle this problem at the level they have, and I can't think of many applications in the world that could comparable in scale and complexity to what the EVE servers have to deal with.
Edit: To summarize, even being 10 years old, no game has come close to matching it in this context.
Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle
#8The report of the battle they link to (http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getting evaporated because of a mis-click.
In most of the games I play, the pay off of the grinding is getting to enjoy fighting more. But I could never play EVE, because battles would be so anxiety provoking. There would be no pleasure at all in earning a Titan, because I would be forever terrified of losing it.
Of course, all games are kind of there to destroy your time. But for some reason it doesn't feel quite as wasted when you have a virtual thing there that is bad-ass in proportion to your time investment.
Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle
#9tl/dr: Sharding and slowing everything down.
Re: How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle
#10It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? Oh, I guess it's 100% utilization, not 100% load. As in, they don't spin down servers to save power during off-hours I guess. The time dilation is a neat solution to the server load problem, but it's sooo annoying as a player…
The real problem for them that forces them to use time dilation is the fact that a solar system can only run on one core. They have a few machines with a 4.4 Ghz or greater processor I believe for system that are high load but currently they are extremely limited in what they can do hardware wise.