EvE Online servers

Montoya

Administrator
Staff member
Oct 31, 2013
9,918
54,303
3,055
RSI Handle
Montoya
Eve still working hard to get those big fleet battles running properly. As he said in the article, they have 18yr old code that needs to be brought into the the modern age of cloud computing.
 

Ayeteeone

Space Marshal
Donor
Oct 22, 2018
546
2,097
2,000
RSI Handle
Ayeteeone
Eve still working hard to get those big fleet battles running properly. As he said in the article, they have 18yr old code that needs to be brought into the the modern age of cloud computing.
Yep. In the early years CCP was aggressive in acquiring and developing technology to optimize the network connections. It made a huge difference in the experience.

The client code is old, it will about run on a potato. But it isn't what causes the server crashes.

What the piece goes fluffy on, is that the actual reason the servers crash is the raw amount of data that needs to be shared between thousands of players within milliseconds. Even with the simple data structure EvE employs, it is a ridiculous amount of interactions for the server to manage and share in real time. At some point in the past there was a clear technical explanation provided, and it seems they still struggle with the problems. Perhaps updating server side to take full advantage of the CPU's that are available would help.. but that may just shift the problem back to network.

EvE moves players between servers by the use of jump gates. It was an early solution to the idea of having everyone in the same universe, and their implementation is still a technical standout. For CIG, server meshing is intended to provide that function, but we actually see the same bottleneck - how much work can a given server handle?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Bambooza

Montoya

Administrator
Staff member
Oct 31, 2013
9,918
54,303
3,055
RSI Handle
Montoya
Adding more servers is one thing, but then getting that data down the pipe to your PC is the other problem.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Ayeteeone

Cugino83

Space Marshal
Apr 25, 2019
1,544
4,931
1,500
RSI Handle
Cugino
....
EvE moves players between servers by the use of jump gates. It was an early solution to the idea of having everyone in the same universe, and their implementation is still a technical standout. For CIG, server meshing is intended to provide that function, but we actually see the same bottleneck - how much work can a given server handle?
For reply to the final question: probably a lot IF the right configurations are done correctly.
AWS works of course on a virtual infrastructure, there are several ESX solution (Microsoft Hyper-V, VMWare v-Shpere just for nnaming the most common...) and even if the implementation could be different, both does have a "scaling system feature" that allow Virtual server to request additional computational resurces (aka RAM and CPU core) if needed...
I don't know the limit for Hyper-V solution and even less the Hypervisor AWS is based on, but for v-sphere the maximum configurable prarameter for a single VM are 6Tb of RAM, and 256 v-Core (a v-core is like a core of a CPU) so they can be massive....
Of course you need to have the phisical resurces available to configure that and that while I've no doubt that Amazon can provide that kind of power, CIG need to rpovide a big enough kind of money, so the problem is not if the server can manage a freaking amount of data, but if CIG is willing to pay for that amount of power.

Oh and to be clear: no server don't need to have those parameter configured all the time: there are automation tool that can re-configure the Vitural server paramter adding or removing resurces while if needed according to pre-configured rules and limit to allow to limit the amount of resources needed globally while assuring the full power when and where needed.
 

maynard

Space Marshal
May 20, 2014
5,123
20,284
2,995
RSI Handle
mgk
[WALL O'TEXT]
Chris Roberts' determination to avoid the mistakes CCP made building Eve Online is the reason Star Citizen is taking so long to develop

and I endorse the way CR is architecting Star Citizen

that said, Chris is also determined not to replicate the features of Eve Online that have led to its 'problematic' success

namely, player-controlled markets and the territorial sovereignty mechanics

so far we have nothing to incentivise large fleet battles

in Eve you can become filthy rich by controlling territory and cornering the market for the rare minerals there

hence the epic battles for territorial control

but no one can corner the NPC-dominated markets in the PU

so why build a fleet of capital ships?

to run giant missions against NPCs?

no thanks
[/WALL O'TEXT]
 
Last edited:

Vavrik

Space Marshal
Donor
Sep 19, 2017
5,452
21,832
3,025
RSI Handle
Vavrik
I don't know the limit for Hyper-V solution and even less the Hypervisor AWS is based on, but for v-sphere the maximum configurable prarameter for a single VM are 6Tb of RAM, and 256 v-Core (a v-core is like a core of a CPU) so they can be massive....
Of course you need to have the phisical resurces available to configure that and that while I've no doubt that Amazon can provide that kind of power, CIG need to rpovide a big enough kind of money, so the problem is not if the server can manage a freaking amount of data, but if CIG is willing to pay for that amount of power.
Technobabble again. Sorry.
Amazon provides the AWS Nitro Hypervisor. I have not done any recent comparisons, all I care about is the product I work with the most works with it without issues. It works with other things too like MS Azure or Google Cloud, but there's frequently pesky tweaks you need to be a platform expert to get right.
 

Bambooza

Space Marshal
Donor
Sep 25, 2017
5,682
17,881
2,875
RSI Handle
MrBambooza
CCP is an interesting tale. To think it started back in 1999 When only Ultima Online was only a couple years old and EverQuest had just come out. Most of the core development team came over from OZ Virtual which was attempting to make VR worlds on the internet for real-time collaboration. Most of Eve's online communication handling was written more as a webclient/server then what was common prior as a unique tcp socket handlers as client/server communications (in fact its still common). https://www.eveonline.com/article/stackless-python-2.7 What is Stackless Python

One of the other major changes they made was shortly after game launch was change from a TCP socket to a UDP socket for client/server communications. (Still looking for the dev blog post) but it was due to the high cost on the servers network communications on packet missing/order hits over simply ignoring missing throwing away out of order packets that is possible with UDP packets.

Beyond large scale battles for me Eve's biggest accomplishment has always been their ability to save and recall huge amounts of data across all of their game servers, something that CIG is still attempting to address for their own game.



so far we have nothing to incentivise large fleet battles
in Eve you can become filthy rich by controlling territory and cornering the market for the rare minerals there
hence the epic battles for territorial control
but no one can corner the NPC-dominated markets in the PU
so why build a fleet of capital ships?
to run giant missions against NPCs?
no thanks
I agree, Star Citizen currently lacks any sort of risk/reward in regards to corp battles besides bragging rights and I hope it doesn't just turn into WoW with raids against scripted boss battles. That they have more in the form of territorial control planet for land claims and resource gathering.


Technobabble again. Sorry.
Amazon provides the AWS Nitro Hypervisor. I have not done any recent comparisons, all I care about is the product I work with the most works with it without issues. It works with other things too like MS Azure or Google Cloud, but there's frequently pesky tweaks you need to be a platform expert to get right.
Lol I just finished a POC using AWS and Lambda to make it no longer tied to any particular server instance so that it can be truly serverless/stateless. Now to convince upper management that their illusions of attempting to be platform agnostic (Azure and Google being included in the deployment possibilities) as well as on premise creates a code base that doesn't optimized anywhere and only increases complexity.
 
Forgot your password?