Engineering Everquest

[Kefkataran]

IEEE Spectrum (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jul05/0705eq.html) has a fairly interesting article about just how much it takes to run Everquest.

From the article:

The Death Star is a huge, warm, windowless room containing the rows and rows of servers that run Sony's online games. The whooshing of a massive air-conditioning system is so loud that conversation is almost impossible. A large steel cage surrounds more than 500 servers stacked 32 high in towering racks—and this is just one battalion, albeit the largest, in Sony's 1500-machine army of servers. A lot of basic info in the article about what Everquest. It's obviously targeted towards non-gamers, but it's still a pretty interesting read once you get to its core. It never fails to amaze me just how much machine-power (not to speak of the man-power) is put into running MMOs.

[DeadPixel]

Do they outsource Indian human bodies for batteries?

[Kefkataran]

Ugh, I always forget this. Kudos to Slashdot.

Do they outsource Indian human bodies for batteries?

I was hoping someone would misconstrue my words if only so I could reply!: yes.

[TrackZero]

"The Death Star is a huge, warm, windowless room"

Well, they've got problems then. A server room should NEVER be warm, it means they didn't plan properly for the amount of hardware in there. They should have some of those boxes moved to another room/site.

[Kefkataran]

Well, they've got problems then. A server room should NEVER be warm, it means they didn't plan properly for the amount of hardware in there. They should have some of those boxes moved to another room/site.


Did you read the article? Not saying your wrong or anything, but they talk about how important cooling is for a good paragraph or two. In any case, since the EQ servers haven't suffered a huge meltdown, I'm sure they're alright.

[GrinR]

I don't need to read it, I live it. Yet despite all this, "experts" in forums everywhere insist that it's outrageous that things like lag occur.

[XenonCJ]

Hmmm pretty uninformative overall.... I guess it's probably all under some NDA, but some things I'd like to know:

What server brands do they use? Dell, Sun, HP? Speed? RAM?
What type of backup software\hardware they use?
Do they use a SAN? What kind? How big?
What flavor of Unix do they use?
How do the older game world servers (EQ1) compare to the newer ones (EQ2)?

[Kefkataran]

I don't need to read it, I live it. Yet despite all this, "experts" in forums everywhere insist that it's outrageous that things like lag occur.

Yes, the "experts" in WoW, EQ, CoH, etc. forums tend to get on my nerves. Oh well.

[Vandenh]

Now compare this to the number of Hotmail/Google servers.

You know.. for a medium sized company with some business presence on the web this is quite normal. The company I work for at the moment stores 4TB (yes that is a T) of user data every month.

[A Lusty Alien]

I thought it was a facinating read. Lots of behind the scene views of what goes on and a general history of EverQuest. I especially liked the one where EQ internet traffic took out San Diego's internet and their ISP scrambled to provide more bandwidth. It was also interesting to see the change over to dynamically allocated CPU power based on avatar presence in a zone.

It is an incredible feat of computer engineering.

[GrinR]

Now compare this to the number of Hotmail/Google servers.

You know.. for a medium sized company with some business presence on the web this is quite normal. The company I work for at the moment stores 4TB (yes that is a T) of user data every month.

Don't take this as an attack on you Vandenh, because it's not. I continually see this sort of thing said (see my comment above re. "experts") as evidence that Blizzard doesn't know what they're doing, or that they need more hardware, or whatever. Yet all the examples given are largely DB transactions over the network, with little to no computation and particularly lacking in real-time persistant two-way interaction. I've been over this a zillion times and it's probably just my brain tumor talking, but I'd like to see someone say, "damn. it's a miricle WoW works at all."

(edit: or any other MMORPG, for that matter...)

[Kefkataran]

. I've been over this a zillion times and it's probably just my brain tumor talking, but I'd like to see someone say, "damn. it's a miricle WoW works at all."

(edit: or any other MMORPG, for that matter...)

Hey, that's almost what I said in the OP!

[ElectricMonk]

you know i wonder what the costs to operate those servers are... a conservative estimate is about 1500 kW of power usage running 24/7. at 10 cents per kwh you're looking at about $108,000 per month in electricity costs alone.