EVE General Discussion

I would like to donate a large amount of hamsters to CCP. Judging by the performance of EVE's servers, I am assuming they are hamster powered. Perhaps my donation of 1 million hamsters will give EVE's servers enough power to actually allow us to play EVE.

In the last 7 days I have been locked out of Jita, twice, due to it being too crowded. The fight in Asakai was a joke. I waited 6 min to jump into Okkamon (1 jump out). After waiting for my 360 second jump timer, I get a black screen and D/C'ed. The next 1.5 hours are spent trying to log into my character in Okkamon, and being unable to even log in.

50,000 active players at a given time is becoming quite normal in New Eden. Perhaps its time to take some of that new sub money and purchase some hardware or something.

Your thinking of Swallows, for hamsters you compare how many coconuts they can eat in a day.

On second thought, let's not go to Jita. It is a silly place.

Asakai was far from a joke. ~2800 players fighting on a normal non-reinforced node and the game being playable for most of those involved is nothing short of spectacular.

Besides, the issue is not with the servers, it is with the 10 year old code. Put simply EVE's code can only run on one core at a time, meaning that processors with multiple cores (ie. every single processor made in the last few years) are largely un-utilised.

This means that simply buying bigger processors will not fix anything, unless CCP wants to re-factor every single line of code in the game (which they should probably do sooner rather than later tbh).

Don't do it, CCP! Trading one million hamsters for only 1 Tritanium? It's too good to be true.

This gets said a lot, but I don't think it's true. Code doesn't just spontaneously start to suck simply because it's old. As far as I understand it, the problem is conceptual.

Python can handle multiple processor cores just fine, so long as you don't care very much about the order of the processes. And most very high volume applications don't care very much about the order of commands processed. Think of it this way: you are out buying groceries on a Saturday afternoon. Just like millions of people all over the world are doing at the same time. You swipe your card, and money moves from your bank account to the grocery store's account.

It doesn't matter if we are shopping at the same time and paying at the same time. The system does a very fast lookup to see if we have sufficient funds, and if we do, it schedules a transaction whenever it's convenient for the system. If I swipe my card 2 seconds before you do, it's quite possible that your transaction could actually take place before mine does. But that doesn't matter. Either way, our respective grocers get their money from us.

EvE has a particularly challenging problem in that the order of the transactions is extremely important. You can't just spread out the processing of commands horizontally and let them go as they please. They have to be kept in order.

Rewriting or refactoring the "old" code doesn't solve this conceptual problem. In fact, in many cases, the GIL actually slows down execution of code when you spread the same task across multiple cores. Keeping the code bound to a single core is probably the smartest solution under the circumstances, and likely has nothing to do with CCP not wanting to or not being able to.

The fundamental problem isn't a coding issue as far as I can tell. The fundamental problem is entirely conceptual, and I can't, off the top of my head, think of any other application that has solved this problem at the scale that CCP needs.


Edited to add:

Obviously many applications do care about the processing order of commands. But those applications maintain order by sacrificing speed. CCP needs a holy grail solution of ordered processing that is also optimized for speed. Those two aspects of computing are typically thought of as mutually exclusive.

One of the biggest ways CCP has improved speed while maintaining ordering is by moving order-agnostic operations off the ordered thread.

IIRC, local chat used to be run on the same process as the rest of the system. Now it's not.

The problem, of course, is that there aren't an unlimited number of order-agnostic operations to be moved, and I would imagine that there aren't any order-agnostic operations left to move off, because it's pretty obvious low hanging fruit and CCP's coders ain't stupid.

Here you go, boys.

http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility

Now play nice.

I've fixed it for You :))

lol 100 people LOL ... made my night

Lucy Ferrr

50,000 active players at a given time is becoming quite normal in New Eden. Perhaps its time to take some of that new sub money and purchase some hardware or something.

The number of people logged in at the same time has absolutely nothing to do with anything you said in the OP.