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The EVE Performance Group
"CCP fix lag nao!!" That's essentially what this writer has been hearing from players since he began EVE Online, and most assuredly it was being uttered long before that. Whether it's a typical forum whine or something much more clever, the message remains the same: Players really want to have fleet battles with several hundred people at once. After all, the shardless galaxy that players populate, in theory, should allow for that. But in practice, lag can turn such engagements into a slide show. Is it unrealistic to assume that 1000-player fleet battles will ever be a reality in EVE? Time will tell. Still, you'd think that CCP Games didn't care about wiping out lag from much of what you read on the forums. They're making some inroads with their new server technologies and ongoing initiatives to improve performance, but players still wonder what goes on behind the scenes. The latest in the recent blitz of dev blogs from CCP Games comes from CCP Tanis, "Introducing: the EVE Performance Group," and is an attempt to explain how this group of developers works to make EVE "run better, faster, and smarter." CCP Tanis lays out how they using monitoring, profiling, and debugging tools to try and reduce server load and increase performance.
EVE Evolved: EVE Online's server model
Almost any time a discussion about EVE Online comes up, one way or another we end up talking about the server. EVE Online is unique among today's most popular MMOs for its single-server approach. While most MMOs deal with large number of users by starting up large numbers of separate servers with identical game universes, EVE maintains only a single copy of its game universe on a massive cluster of servers. CCP's decision to go with a server model that doesn't use any sharding or instancing whatsoever has had a major impact on in-game activities and how the game has developed.Server woes:Unfortunately for CCP, maintaining their vision of a single game universe has proven a lot more difficult and costly than anyone anticipated. Working with IBM, the EVE server cluster is maintained in London and is currently the largest supercomputer employed in the gaming industry. Even with this massive power behind the EVE universe, there are still problems as CCP tries to keep the server upgraded ahead of its ever-expanding playerbase.In this article, I discuss the unique gameplay that is possible thanks to EVE's server model, the problems the server currently faces and what CCP is planning to do about it.
Texas Memory Systems' builds freakin' fast RamSan storage
Do you want a high-end disk to go with your ultra-fast InfiniBand setup? (We do.) Texas Memory Systems has just built some super-speedy solid state storage that can operate in pure InfiniBand (that's an extremely fast serial data connection) and mixed-InfiniBand environments, and due to its low latency and high speed, the company claims that its disk is the fastest storage in the world. The RamSan drive has seriously ludicrous access times -- usually in the neighborhood of 15 microseconds, 250 times faster than your garden-variety hard drive for mere mortals. Further, it's got up to 50,000 random I/Os per second per single-ported controller, which is more than 100 times quicker than regular off-the-shelf drives. We're not sure how much this will cost, but you can bet that it'll be a lot more than the under-a-dollar per gigabyte trend that we've been seeing lately, and will be used only by very particular businesses for very particular needs. Like ours, for, um, whatever the heck we want.[Via TechWorld; thanks, Evan]
