EVE General Discussion

*Tips hate to CCP*
Thanks for letting me take part in a bit of EVE's history.

One one hand, great work that we managed to get a fight at these mindblowing numbers. Thanks CCP, I haven't been around that long, but I'm being told not too long ago, 1400 people in system caused serial node and client crashes.

On the other hand, it really shows from a technical perspective how limited the whole system is because it's single threaded. I know that work is being done with the "brain in a box" initiative to offload some of the work of a single node to another, but that's just avoiding having to redo the server's main processing loop.

I seriously hope that there are people at CCP taking a long hard look at the current server code and thinking about steps how to break it up and make it multi-threading/processing capable. Because this single-threaded ness is really the hard cap of scaling that will be possible in this game. I'm not writing this because I want to have 6000 people fighting in a system next time, but because from a (software) architectural standpoint this is the only thing that will fix several major technical issues of this game or allow their fixing in the first place. For example, if just 2 threads could process all ships and their whereabouts instead of the current one, you could instantly double the population in Jita. If there could be one processing thread per grid, you could double it again, since those in station are "off-grid" to those at the station but in space, etc.

I know this is a tremendous and hard undertaking. I also know that there are some very clever programmers at CCP. But I've never once heard anything about something like that even hinted at and CCP is uncharacteristically open for the gaming industry with technical details. My assumption is simply that nobody dares to touch the core code that probably is up to 10 years old and so brittle and interlocked with everything else for fear of introducing new and old bugs. That will invariably happen if you go on such undertaking. If you do not, however, then we have reached the maximum that this game allows. Both in Jita and 6VDT.

CPUs only get marginally faster and the gain is eaten up immediately. We're getting massive horizontal scalability (multi cores) however. This is known in the industry for at least 5 years now. If you cannot do multi-threading, you stop being able to scale.

So, CCP, are you looking into multi-threading? Will we ever see something like a cap-free JITA because no longer a single thread has to do all the work? Is this stuff even a priority? Inquiring minds want to know.

(I am aware this text sounds a bit more .. negative as I intended it to be. It's amazing that the EVE servers held up so far. But still I hope that this is one of the top priorities on your list to get the system to scale further, as this is EVEs niche)

Massive kudos to CCP for keeping that server alive last night, I mean, that think must have been close to flameout the whole time!

Additionally big props to Goons for the fight, you were better prepared and had complete superiority, frankly it was impressive as ****, much respect.

As for the guys at our end? Allies, leadership, FC's and every single grunt, massive well done for not backing down, this was the biggest fight in gaming history and you were all a part of it.

Frankly, even though we lost and Fountain will soon enough belong to Goons, I will always be able to hold my head high and state proudly that "I was there, I fought until the end for over 5 hours in massive, soul crushing TiDi to give 6VDT-H and Fountain as a whole the send off it deserved."

I don't think anyone who is not trolling can say after last night that anyone involved, win or lose, should feel bad. We made history ladies and gentlemen and I thank each and every one of you for helping me be a part of that.

Peace out.

It was a pleasure flying with you guys, here's one hoping we can do it again very soon and if need be I for one will happily come to your home and defend it with you fellas.

Yes

Because, tears.