All Realms Pls Read:

[Driwen]

well dont know how GOA runs the nodes now, but before the hardware upgrade people in malmo would ld if there was a zonecrash in mid frontier. So it might be good to add extra servers to seperate frontier from inner classic realm.

One but though, no idea if this goes for this game. But the more hardware you add, the more bureaucracy is needed. So for example for normal pc cpu's, it isnt worthwhile to have more than 2 (iirc) as the third will mostly be spend on keeping check what the other 2 are doing and what which one can do next.
So it might be that adding 3 servers, would lead to having to add another one just to control and check what all the servers are doing (ofc this might be not true just wondering and guessing).

And replacing zones to other servers might have the same effect of needing much more bureaucracy and leading to server crashes.

It could off course work, but atleast as I have to little knowledge of pc and software and of how DAoC works I cant really tell if it will. It could be worthwhile to point these suggestions to mythic/goa.

 

[Driwen]

Originally posted by old.Ramas
And what we do know, is that the US servers run happily with larger battles than our servers, and indeed that our servers have happily run with larger battles in the past than they seem to be doing right now.

http://vnboards.ign.com/Fans_Round_Table/b5176/62267144/?13 <-- prove that US servers arent safe from zonecrashes either

and yeah I do found it troublesome that crashes of the last week happened at times, where I would think the numbers werent that high. Time will tell wether goa has destabilized Excalibur somehow or not.

And ramas yes the responsibility lies with GOA to get a good product, but to flame them for something that isnt directly their fault isnt something that I find right.

 

[old.Ramas]

well dont know how GOA runs the nodes now, but before the hardware upgrade people in malmo would ld if there was a zonecrash in mid frontier. So it might be good to add extra servers to seperate frontier from inner classic realm.

One of the better moves in Frontiers is that the home realms and the frontiers will be seperate loadable realms, if nothing else this should mean rvr crashes have less chance of affecting pvers and so on - which is probably a good thing.

One but though, no idea if this goes for this game. But the more hardware you add, the more bureaucracy is needed. So for example for normal pc cpu's, it isnt worthwhile to have more than 2 (iirc) as the third will mostly be spend on keeping check what the other 2 are doing and what which one can do next.

I have no idea what servers DAOC runs, but I assume they are some variant unix, running some level of 'enterprise' level servers.

In most cases you can add cpus with no significant overhead issues until you run out of slots, then you need to spend hundreds of thousands on a whole new box. As many as 24 or more in a box is not unusual. The question as to whether an upgrade will do anything for you in a cost effective manner is solely one of whether the box has open slots, and whether it is cpu time that is your bottleneck (as opposed to network bandwidth or physical memory or memory bandwidth for example).

The PC case you cite exists because consumer software cuts corners to save development costs by assuming you have no more than 1 or at most 2 cpus. I would be amazed if the same applies to something like daoc server software.

You never know of course.

 

[Driwen]

Originally posted by old.Ramas
One of the better moves in Frontiers is that the home realms and the frontiers will be seperate loadable realms, if nothing else this should mean rvr crashes have less chance of affecting pvers and so on - which is probably a good thing.

actually with the current load capacity of a server it troubles me a little, unless they make sure the frontier zone is supported by multiple servers. As 3500 people is the max on our game server, apparently 1000 seems to be the max for one (real) server. I wouldnt find it weird if 50% or more off the people on the server would like to go RvR, but mythic/goa probably knows this so I guess they will have taken care of it.

 

[old.Ramas]

I have no idea what the VN board link says because VN plays up when I view it on this PC, however, I would say that VN is even worse than this board for underinformed rubbish, so I'm not sure how much it can be trusted.

I asked a few people on other boards what it takes to crash a US server, most responded in the 700-1000 people in one zone region.

We've been no-where near that.

One response chosen 'at random' for that that it suits my argument

Well I gave up on the naff connections and naff servers run by GOA, well over a year back now.

When I moved to the Mythic servers, I noticed an immediate improvement in connection, lag when xp'ing, which had been such a pain with GOA, was non-existant almost all the time (when I did get it, it was usually my ISP at fault). When my Chanter got to the low 30's, Mids launched a relic raid, and low level or not, I went out to help defend. There were such numbers there, my first thoughts were "Oh well, I'll get 1 frame every 3 seconds any moment, freeze up, and be back at my bind point when I log back in." It didn't happen. I could actually fight, contribute, and enjoy myself. I even got a pile of rp's!

My connection is a 56k dial up modem now too, and it is much better than the performance I was getting with ISDN connecting to GOA.

Go back to anything run by GOA? Not even when Hell freezes over.

An ex-Excaliber Hib.

This is never going to be conclusive, but I suspect any number of tales of woe could be found on either server.

In general, from the limited number of reports available that I personally have seen, the US servers seem to run better.

 

[Driwen]

Ramas read the other thread I quoted most of the important posts (very little off them though:/).

And I never have had any lag problems except when im near a large force of albs/hibs or my pc is busy with something else. But I dont think opentransit (which is what 80% of ppl on english server connects through i think) is a really good backbone and it has been known to give trouble rather often.

My first impression is that Excalibur is or was bugged as the crashes on monday and tuesday werent logical. Maybe it got rebooted wrong or the ToA upgrade was wrong. Lets hope that GOA has fixed it.
As except for this week, excalibur hasnt zonecrashed since the hardware upgrade afaik.

edit: as I said above I think GOA has a a bad backbone connection, which Mythic doesnt have. Add to the fact that Mythic actually informs its customer whats going on, which leads to people being happier about the servers. Hopefully GOA might learn with Erivoss that is useful to put out news even when you dont know the cause yet and have it completly solved.

 

[old.Ramas]

Originally posted by Driwen
actually with the current load capacity of a server it troubles me a little, unless they make sure the frontier zone is supported by multiple servers. As 3500 people is the max on our game server, apparently 1000 seems to be the max for one (real) server. I wouldnt find it weird if 50% or more off the people on the server would like to go RvR, but mythic/goa probably knows this so I guess they will have taken care of it.

I'd be close to certain that when they say 'a server' they are already refering to what could in a particular case mean clusters of servers so I suspect you don't need to worry too much on that count. Clustering servers, and managing multiple cpus within a server is more than probably all handled in the operating system layer - transparent to the developers putting code on top of them.

Clusters of servers can be set up to 'look like' a single server from the application's point of view.

That said, while large numbers will want to rvr each night, I suspect that even today a large majority of rvr players end up in one realm, there is usually on a given night, a zerg zone, a soloers zone, and a deserted HW.

Currently whichever is the busiest rvr area shares a realm with one of the home areas. I suspect that the home area today has more people in it than the 2nd and 3rd busiest rvr area.

The real danger for frontiers that I see is that it is designed to make zergs headbutt each other repeatedly. It encourages epic battles by the very deisgn of the zones.

I think it's fairly clear that these epic battles are overloading something (I suspect simply because of the number of messages generated to tell 300 people what the other 299 are doing), this combined with the ongoing load from the rest of the realm = death.

If 300 people stand at the amg and cast one spell each, the server has to generate 89,700 messages indicating that 'suchandsuch has cast a spell!'.

The problem we have immeaditely on excal as I see it is that the size of the battle needed to tear the fabric of space-time on excal actually seems to have dropped.

 

[old.Ramas]

Originally posted by Driwen
as I said above I think GOA has a a bad backbone connection

Entirely possible.

And entirely GOAs responsibility. :/

 

[Driwen]

Originally posted by old.Ramas
Entirely possible.

And entirely GOAs responsibility. :/

opentransit is owned by france telecom who owns(or other way around?) wanadoo, who agains owns GOA. So I doubt GOA has much of a choice excepting opentransit, but hopefully that maintenance they did this week, might have improved the backbone abit (trully optomistic thought i guess).

Allthough I do understand alot of GOA's mistakes, I dont think I would have chosen the european servers had I all known this. GOA isnt really bad, but I do think mythic runs their servers more profesional and the waiting time between two patches with goa is rather long (which is caused, because they combine two patches).

Btw i havent had much problem with opentransit myself, except for a few times. But I do think it is the weakest link in the connection to excalibur.