EVE General Discussion

From my perspective?

I would expect a CSM candidate to be informed enough to answer these questions for themselves. To potentially even read the information presented to them, assimilate the information and comprehend that so that I could be comfortable in knowing they would represent me intelligently and with solid knowledge backing them up; that they would be able to research and find answers and help guide this game forwards.

Otherwise, what value does a member of the CSM add when somebody else does everything for them?

You have been given a fair bit of information to read and you've basically glossed over it because nobody provided you with a simple, three word summary.

The information already presented to you multiple times says quite plainly - the problem is not hardware; it is software and they are working on it. But it is a fair part of the core of a massive system and there is a large volume of work that needs to be both well designed and tested before just changing a line of code. And over time they make more and more improvements :)

You aren't asking anything CCP don't already ask at every capacity planning meeting they have.

Do you have a link?

They can off-load things like chat and characters to a different CPU. But Destiny, the physics engine, can only run on one CPU.

Uh no, he's criticizing you for being unable to gather and summarize information yourself and instead asking others to do the hard work for you. Rightly so.
And as much of a polymath savant hero as you seem to think you are I doubt you have anywhere near the level of expertise on server architecture that CCP has working for them, nor the level of understanding required to make that work with the game software (not the client, the software that the server is running).

I don't have that either, granted, but that's why you don't see me making sweeping statements about what CCP needs to do better or offering my brilliant ideas on how to tackle their toughest problems.

Seriously man you are not helping. You are feeding and encouraging this kind of behavior by agreeing with it or stating you support it. If you honestly consider linking something in a post as "Hard Work" then I don't think I have the ability to reason with you.

I really wish people saved their confrontational attitude for scenarios when it is appropriate. Rebuking me because I am making an effort to better understand something is counter intuitive and really against the code of conduct. If you dislike or disapprove of the fact I am asking for help in understand something arguably complex then keep it too yourself OR explain it better and show how smart you are.

I don't think he is talking about the act of linking the stuff.

More, the knowledge of EVE in order to know where to look for said info, actually going and digging it up and the ability to recognize the most likely relevant pieces.

You know, the whole :effort: part.

let me guess, you're going to google 'high performance hardware' and make a bunch of threads comparing stats involving 'hertz' and 'flops' and yelling about how CCP should buy Y instead of using X?

I'm afraid that you are mistaken.

Certain operations can be offloaded to other systems/cores, but the core of each node is still locked to one cpu.

Those nodes cannot be made smaller than one solar system (yet) and they cannot be shifted between servers without reloading the node (and kicking everyone off) (yet).

There are some magic that can be done to limit the problems, and there appear to some very clever people actively applying just such magic.

Achieving anything more than what Gridlock can give us will require quite a deep recode deep down in EvE's ancient code base.

All this has been discussed several times, with good input from the Devs in question.

Freely available for anyone with an interest in system architecture and performance.

When did providing exactly the information you're asking for and telling you how to find more become "dogpiling"?!

The Database is on a RAMSAN, which is a storage device made up entirely of RAM. It's thousands of times faster than enterprise hard drives, and much faster than SSDs.

The spaceship simulation is single threaded, due to the fact that the core of the game was coded back before dual cores existed. Some functions like market processing are offloaded to separate clusters, but the actual processing of pew-pew is done on a single core. That's just the nature of the architecture, and there is a very slim chance of this ever changing. MMOs just don't scale well to multiple cores because every entity on screen is accessing the same dataset and needs to be synced.

They have in house thin clients that can simulate 1000 player fleet battles at will, and they have reporting tools that break down the latency of each stage of each server tick with fine granularity.

The server hardware, as far as I know, is getting a bit old. CPUs used are 3.3GhZ wolfdales. It's about time for a CPU upgrade, but unfortunately new CPUs are not increasing single threaded performance much at all, so it's not as urgent as it may seem. It's likely just not the right time for CCP to move to new hardware yet, both because of financial reasons (DUST will kill CCP financials if it tanks, but will give them breathing room if it takes off) and because the hardware landscape might not quite be where they want it to be yet. At the moment, each new generation of Intel CPU gives about a 10-15% boost to single threaded performance, clock for clock. That's just not a lot. AMD has dropped completely off the radar when it comes to single threaded performance.

CCP does experiment with new hardware. TQ-SOL-099 or "Frankenserver" is used to host the biggest fleet battles and Jita. It's an Intel Xeon X5698 (hex core with 4 cores disabled, running at 4.4GhZ and meant for high frequency trading) with 2100mhz DDR3 and 2x offloaded NICs. This is a test system that is not suitable for a rollout into a datacenter. When this level of performance is available in mainline server chips, it's likely CCP will feel the urge to do a full scale rollout.