Clustering development insight

Nostalrius official announcements

Re: Clustering development insight

by Kaiji » Mon Feb 29, 2016 7:12 pm

Mdmadam wrote:Not nearly as many players would leave the current PvP server as people think


Precisely. Which is why it makes sense to cluster this server instead of starting a new one.

I get it. You want another PvP server. That's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but don't act like clustering the current server is not going to solve the lag issues related to a high pop.
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Re: Clustering development insight

by Mdmadam » Mon Feb 29, 2016 9:39 pm

Kaiji wrote:
Precisely. Which is why it makes sense to cluster this server instead of starting a new one.

I get it. You want another PvP server. That's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but don't act like clustering the current server is not going to solve the lag issues related to a high pop.


This isn't me as a player demanding a server just because I want PvP with less population. This is me with a technical background and educational experience on the subject saying it won't work. The lag will drop down slightly for a bit but will spike back up, it doesn't prevent more people from logging on until its overloaded again. Your good latency can be affected merely by others will bad latency connecting hence why many private game servers drop players from their servers that are above that threshold they set. Remember playing online games in the late 90s/early 00s and you could always tell who had Dial-Up cause they'd make everyone else lag cause the server basically has to slow down for them.

In the end this was never about solving lag issues, thats a diversion from the real issue which is population. There is nothing wrong with having 12k players just not on one-server, very very few MMOs have ever had that much traffic on one server.
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Re: Clustering development insight

by Dreez » Mon Feb 29, 2016 11:50 pm

Mdmadam wrote:Your good latency can be affected merely by others will bad latency connecting hence why many private game servers drop players from their servers that are above that threshold they set. Remember playing online games in the late 90s/early 00s and you could always tell who had Dial-Up cause they'd make everyone else lag cause the server basically has to slow down for them.


No, that's for sure not the case for MMORPGs.
What you are describing is only the case for games that set one user as the game host, basically making him the "server".

Latency only has a very minor effect on server delay in MMORPGs, for example through lag countermeasures such as custom lag tolerance. However this is such a small part, it will hardly have any noticeable effect
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Re: Clustering development insight

by Nabled » Tue Mar 01, 2016 5:53 am

Mdmadam wrote:
Kaiji wrote:
Precisely. Which is why it makes sense to cluster this server instead of starting a new one.

I get it. You want another PvP server. That's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but don't act like clustering the current server is not going to solve the lag issues related to a high pop.


This isn't me as a player demanding a server just because I want PvP with less population. This is me with a technical background and educational experience on the subject saying it won't work. The lag will drop down slightly for a bit but will spike back up, it doesn't prevent more people from logging on until its overloaded again. Your good latency can be affected merely by others will bad latency connecting hence why many private game servers drop players from their servers that are above that threshold they set. Remember playing online games in the late 90s/early 00s and you could always tell who had Dial-Up cause they'd make everyone else lag cause the server basically has to slow down for them.

In the end this was never about solving lag issues, thats a diversion from the real issue which is population. There is nothing wrong with having 12k players just not on one-server, very very few MMOs have ever had that much traffic on one server.


that isnt at all how it works.
back in the day it was 'kindof' like that due to old ATM/Frame relay circuits being the main connection type for the 'cloud' and NBMA networks would slow down if the server had to repeatedly send update packets to a client and the client took ages to respond, not to mention the use of HUB's, single broadcast domain providing a few servers all at once but that was early 90's and it hasn't been like that for wow at all.

i don't fully understand the server architecture and how it handles processing, but networking is my thing.
As i understand it the client send very small updates with keystrokes, positioning and timings, the server sends periodic updates to each player with information pertaining to them, e.g. hits received from NPC/players, position of other players and NPC's within your field of vision (increasing view distance increases this update packet size causing more bandwidth utilization), and other back end stuff.
If the client doesn't receive these updates due to latency or packet loss, everything around them stays in place and NPC's, players and objects won't load because according to your last update from the server, nothing else exists.
Now, networking has come a looong way in the last 10 years, bandwidth is definitely not an issue, latency will cause delays, packets will drop but most(all) of that would be from individual clients connections, or if the nost provider is having issues (i.e. a massive ddos or peering problems), other then that, any issues encountered won't likely be due to networking.

clustering the server is a fucking brilliant idea, sharing the computation requests across multiple server stacks is paramount, you've got 12000 players at peak on a single server, it compounds in a way because the more you increase the population, the more is required of the server because there is more people on each client's screen increasing the size of each periodic update, thats a lot of processing and out of my field of expertise but it sounds like clustering would solve alot of problems.

believe me when i say that the server will NEVER slow down due to a clients slow connection.
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Re: Clustering development insight

by Kaiji » Tue Mar 01, 2016 7:53 am

Mdmadam wrote:In the end this was never about solving lag issues, thats a diversion from the real issue which is population.


The population will be spread over several different servers, which will relieve lag. That's the entire point of server clustering.

Mdmadam wrote:There is nothing wrong with having 12k players just not on one-server, very very few MMOs have ever had that much traffic on one server.


There won't be 12K players on one server. They'll be spread over a group of servers which will collectively hold one realm.
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Re: Clustering development insight

by buczech » Wed Mar 02, 2016 2:20 pm

One question, WHEN!!!??? I don't want to sound ungratefully, but can we see this update coming live anytime soon?
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Re: Clustering development insight

by Doofoos » Wed Mar 02, 2016 3:04 pm

buczech wrote:anytime soon?

Soon™ is Blizzlike so ... :D
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Re: Clustering development insight

by Azonos » Wed Mar 02, 2016 3:37 pm

Doofoos wrote:
buczech wrote:anytime soon?

Soon™ is Blizzlike so ... :D


True...
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Re: Clustering development insight

by Mdmadam » Wed Mar 02, 2016 5:52 pm

Dreez wrote:
No, that's for sure not the case for MMORPGs.
What you are describing is only the case for games that set one user as the game host, basically making him the "server".

Latency only has a very minor effect on server delay in MMORPGs, for example through lag countermeasures such as custom lag tolerance. However this is such a small part, it will hardly have any noticeable effect


Not true, game servers not hosted by a user can also be affected, just not as common because the infrastructure usually has hardware that is up to the task. Latency can affect MMOs just not as much as it would an FPS, which are more intense in terms of action, but as soon as I go above 100-120 ms I start to notice choppiness even when walking.

Kaiji wrote:
The population will be spread over several different servers, which will relieve lag. That's the entire point of server clustering.

There won't be 12K players on one server. They'll be spread over a group of servers which will collectively hold one realm.


But will not stop more new players from joining, server needs to divert its new population else where and I don't mean to the PvE server. Its not just about the lag being relieved, its about the ever increasing population. You could have 0ms latency, but if theres 20k players online you're not gonna have a good time. Very few games function the way they were intended with a single realm population that size.
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Re: Clustering development insight

by Kaiji » Thu Mar 03, 2016 6:09 pm

Mdmadam wrote:....if theres 20k players online you're not gonna have a good time.


If that happens then eventually maybe another realm will be needed somewhere down the line.

For now, clustering the current PvP server will relieve lag by spreading the present population over several servers. Surely you don't contest this?
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