EVE dev blog explores balancing player load
CCP has posted yet another incredibly detailed and highly technical dev blog over on the official EVE Online community site, this one relating to how the studio balances the player load across the node-based single shard on which New Eden exists. The post begins by explaining that an increase in players with this year's Odyssey expansion led to extreme CPU load in empire space, which in turn created scenarios where EVE's time dilation technology had to kick in even for systems that weren't experiencing some sort of mass fleet battle.
The blog walks through how CCP identified the problem and also explains the solution, which basically comes down to rebalancing which systems share nodes by performing multiple splits of the existing universe. If you're an EVE player or love exceptionally granular, detailed breakdowns of the though process behind server-side changes, the full post is worth a read.
