Live Minecraft server connections

#1

Post by citricsquid » Wed, May 02, 2012, 1:13 AM UTC

Live Minecraft server connections
stats.minecraft.net

Re: Live Minecraft server connections

#2

Post by duskwuff » Wed, May 02, 2012, 2:39 AM UTC

Lots of connections from the US to a couple of "hot spots" in France and Germany. I'm guessing those are the locations of a couple of popular dedicated server providers?

Re: Live Minecraft server connections

#3

Post by alvinl » Wed, May 02, 2012, 2:49 AM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #2

Lots of connections from the US to a couple of "hot spots" in France and Germany. I'm guessing those are the locations of a couple of popular dedicated server providers?

Yup! OVH (http://www.ovh.co.uk/) and Hetzner (http://www.hetzner.de/en/) seem to be the most popular hosts for minecraft servers

Re: Live Minecraft server connections

#4

Post by emehrkay » Wed, May 02, 2012, 3:22 AM UTC

I remember this from the first node.js competition. Back then you could go to #nodejs on free node and it would show locations of messages if you were to mention someone while typing. Cool stuff

Re: Live Minecraft server connections

#5

Post by fsckin » Wed, May 02, 2012, 3:55 AM UTC

The perfectionist in me is slightly bugged that traffic from Australia to the US flies over Europe.

Re: Live Minecraft server connections

#6

Post by sidcool » Wed, May 02, 2012, 3:58 AM UTC

Can someone explain me this in a layman's language?

Re: Live Minecraft server connections

#7

Post by powdahound » Wed, May 02, 2012, 4:55 AM UTC

emehrkay wrote: post #4

I remember this from the first node.js competition. Back then you could go to #nodejs on free node and it would show locations of messages if you were to mention someone while typing. Cool stuff

Here's the source for that one: https://github.com/mape/node-wargames

Re: Live Minecraft server connections

#8

Post by marcins » Wed, May 02, 2012, 5:19 AM UTC

fsckin wrote: post #5

The perfectionist in me is slightly bugged that traffic from Australia to the US flies over Europe.

They should have the server or client send a traceroute with the data it sends when it logs a connection for more accurate mapping!

Re: Live Minecraft server connections

#9

Post by thristian » Wed, May 02, 2012, 6:12 AM UTC

sidcool wrote: post #6

Can someone explain me this in a layman's language?

Whenever a Minecraft player connects to a Minecraft server, the server communicates with Mojang HQ to verify that the user is actually the person they're trying to connect as. This means that Mojang gets to log a bunch of "client with address X connected to server with address Y" records.

It looks like they've used some geolocation API to guess at GPS coordinates for each address, and animated a little line connecting from the client coordinates to the server coordinates.

Re: Live Minecraft server connections

#10

Post by p_f » Wed, May 02, 2012, 7:24 AM UTC

thristian wrote: post #9

sidcool wrote: post #6

Can someone explain me this in a layman's language?

Whenever a Minecraft player connects to a Minecraft server, the server communicates with Mojang HQ to verify that the user is actually the person they're trying to connect as. This means that Mojang gets to log a bunch of "client with address X connected to server with address Y" records. It looks like they've used some geolocation API to guess at GPS coordinates for each address, and animated a little line connectin…

Does anyone know if these "connection records" are available somewhere? That would be a great source of information to study the Minecraft ecosystem...