Why have 5 servers active on off-peak hours?

Tarr · 2019-01-14 14:14:24

As the title says why do we need to keep five servers running with presteam numbers? I get that it sucked beforehand having your server flip off and basically kill off the lineage but do we really need to have servers with <20 players? Lets just compare a few days ago to today when posting this thread:

4 servers running:

5 servers running:

Is this absolutely needed? I understand Jason went through and made it so the servers would dip together thus preventing servers from needlessly preventing births on the server but wouldn't it be better to just split the servers into 3 40/40/40 servers on off peak hours instead of this?

Like I understand during the peak hours having a bunch of 30/40/50+ population servers but these off peak hours make it where if a city gets bad birth rng the city is lost and thus the server just becomes all Eves. Basically if you play on a low pop server once you are lineage banned you should be hopping servers instead of sticking around.

CrazyEddie · 2019-01-14 14:20:17

If Jason disabled sticky sessions you wouldn't have to manually switch servers, the reflector would do that for you.

Sticky sessions means that if you are connecting to a "random" server you will keep being sent back to the same server each time you connect. This is actually a very good thing for reconnecting when you accidentally disconnect, but otherwise I don't think there's any benefit to it. I'd like to see Jason implement within-lifetime connection recovery without using sticky sessions across different lifetimes.

SirCaio · 2019-01-14 14:42:22

Yeah, I kinda dislike this new system. Depending on wich time of the day you choose to play it's Eve run after Eve run and that's no fun.

thundersen · 2019-01-14 14:51:22

I think he should try out renting fewer and bigger servers. The population update limited the effects of bouncing, but the minimum number of players for every server decreased as well. See here.

Peak total number of players is a bit over 250 currently. I suppose these could fit on one more powerful server. Minimum players per day is around 90. When numbers go down, ideally the temp/yum competition should weed out "weak" lineages. Have one or two servers on standby for updates and outages, plus maybe a few smaller ones for dedicated groups.

CrazyEddie wrote:

I'd like to see Jason implement within-lifetime connection recovery without using sticky sessions across different lifetimes.

Agreed.

Last edited by thundersen (2019-01-14 14:52:03)

Tarr · 2019-01-14 14:54:11

SirCaio wrote:

Yeah, I kinda dislike this new system. Depending on wich time of the day you choose to play it's Eve run after Eve run and that's no fun.

Yeah I'm not a huge fan of a server essentially devolving into an Eve server once bad luck finally kills of the servers only city in these low population cases. You're better off just looking what servers have people in them at that point and swapping over until the server either starts getting back on its legs or the bad Eves die off and rotate into the better Eves family.

Dodge · 2019-01-14 14:58:32

I agree, i played recently and most of my lives were either eve runs or small villages, i have seen maybe 1-2 villages that had started the newcomen hammer but that's about it

We have new tech but with the current system villages are not able to go to this point, not counting the wildlife in wrong biome mostly mosquitoes killing people in deserts,grassland etc

Nerfing old eve was fine and fair imo, spawning in villages already made was too easy but now it's the exact opposite there is the perfect combination of people spread out on different servers, old age eve nerf and wildlife in wrong biome killing villages to make advanced technology almost impossible

I dont know why we are not all on one big server, if it's a cost/performance issue then it's understandable but having one big server should cost about the same as 15 servers especially since 10-11 of them are unused

dangergirl713 · 2019-01-14 16:03:04

Some people prefer to do solo play on the less busy servers. If you don't want to be eve than play on a busy server by choosing server 1-2-3-4 in the settings. I have no trouble being a baby when I do this. Seriously, you people complain too much. It's one guy updating the game not a team and the game is great.

thundersen · 2019-01-14 16:18:02

dangergirl713 wrote:

Some people prefer to do solo play on the less busy servers. If you don't want to be eve than play on a busy server by choosing server 1-2-3-4 in the settings. I have no trouble being a baby when I do this.

Please read more carefully. The point is that there are no "busy" servers at certain times.

dangergirl713 wrote:

Seriously, you people complain too much. It's one guy updating the game not a team and the game is great.

Many people do, I agree. This is a 20-buck solo-dev indie game and most of us have payed a few cents per hour of playing time.

But still, most of this is constructive criticism, not whining.

Tarr · 2019-01-14 16:53:35

dangergirl713 wrote:

Some people prefer to do solo play on the less busy servers. If you don't want to be eve than play on a busy server by choosing server 1-2-3-4 in the settings. I have no trouble being a baby when I do this. Seriously, you people complain too much. It's one guy updating the game not a team and the game is great.

The issue is even when picking your server you can be stuck in an Eve loop due to nowhere on the server being able to continue a lineage past one or two generations. As soon as you are lineage banned from a town on these lop pop servers you're going to be in a constant state of Gen 1 or Gen 2 and the only fix for this is to leave the server thus lowering the population further until the other servers start having die outs to refill your own. As long as the population on the server is >30 generally speaking you're able to have a village or two while some players are in Eve camps doing their own thing. <20 You can have a town until it innately dies of bad players/bad luck and then suddenly there's only Eves everywhere.

The thread isn't "bloo bloo I have to play Eve." it's "Can we squeeze the servers a little tighter" so when off hours hit we're not waiting for a bubble to burst that sends the server into Eve hell.

CrazyEddie · 2019-01-14 17:36:02

Tarr wrote:

As soon as you are lineage banned from a town on these lop pop servers you're going to be in a constant state of Gen 1 or Gen 2 and the only fix for this is to leave the server thus lowering the population further until the other servers start having die outs to refill your own.

Servers having die-outs do not refill the other servers, because of sticky sessions. When players die and are reborn, they always reconnect to the same server they were just on. To refill the other servers you need to have an influx of players who are just starting to play for the day, or have some advanced players choose to manually switch to the other servers.

Disabling sticky sessions would dramatically improve the situation that Tarr is complaining about. It would effectively turn all the active servers into a single big server, at least in terms of births and rebirths.

With sticky sessions (the current situation), all servers have the same population regardless of their survival rates, and every player is a captive of the one server they're assigned to. Players stuck on a server with low-lifespan high-deathrate rapid-turnover towns will be stuck being frequently reborn to those towns, or pushed into an Eve run if they manage to get lineage banned (either by living long enough, or /die-ing).

By contrast, without sticky sessions, servers whose current towns are poorly run and thus have shorter-than-average lifespans will see a net loss in population; they'll have a larger-than-average share of deaths but receive only an even share of births. The other servers, where the current towns are well-run, will have their populations grow. When players get lineage banned from one town, they'll have the possibility of being reborn onto any of the servers and so have a wider range of other towns that they could spawn in, which will dramatically reduce the number of forced Eve runs.

Anyone who wants an Eve run will always be able to get one just by /die-ing until they're lineage banned from enough towns. It might take more /die-s to get there, but they'll always get there eventually.

ryanb · 2019-01-14 18:01:37

CrazyEddie wrote:

When players get lineage banned from one town, they'll have the possibility of being reborn onto any of the servers and so have a wider range of other towns that they could spawn in, which will dramatically reduce the number of forced Eve runs.

This would be an improvement but still not as effective as a single server since there's a chance you'll randomly get added to the same server where you have the lineage ban and have no chance of spawning in a server with a larger city until you die again.

That is unless the reflector takes lineage bans into account and prefers active servers where you have the fewest lineage bans. This would probably require a big change to the reflector.

Dodge wrote:

I dont know why we are not all on one big server, if it's a cost/performance issue then it's understandable but having one big server should cost about the same as 15 servers especially since 10-11 of them are unused

One server is definitely ideal. I think the bottleneck was database lookup time. Adding 4x the objects doesn't necessarily mean 4x the CPU/Memory will be as effective. However I would like to see Jason's thoughts on this. Could we handle 200 players on a single server with a giant VPS?

thundersen · 2019-01-14 18:15:35

ryanb wrote:

One server is definitely ideal. I think the bottleneck was database lookup time. Adding 4x the objects doesn't necessarily mean 4x the CPU/Memory will be as effective. However I would like to see Jason's thoughts on this. Could we handle 200 players on a single server with a giant VPS?

A quick search yielded this Linode forum thread.

A Linode employee stated:

When under no contention for disk (meaning, you aren't competing with any of the other tenants) the performance would be identical. However, all hosts have multiple RAID units, and you share a RAID unit with fewer other neighbors the larger you plan have. The larger plan you have, the fewer other Linodes you share your RAID unit with - so, performance under contention is higher the larger plan you have.

Given that the current configured max for all servers except 1 is 160, chances are a bigger box could handle the required number.

ryanb · 2019-01-14 20:23:03

I think the bottleneck has to do with the number of players and objects in the database not scaling linearly. There was a discussion a while back on database lookup slowing down exponentially as objects are added. So if you make a server 4x faster it won't necessarily handle 4x the number of players. He has made performance improvements on the database so this may no longer be the case.

Last edited by ryanb (2019-01-14 20:37:58)

CrazyEddie · 2019-01-14 21:10:57

Big O is a real bitch.

thundersen · 2019-01-14 21:30:48

ryanb wrote:

I think the bottleneck has to do with the number of players and objects in the database not scaling linearly. There was a discussion a while back on database lookup slowing down exponentially as objects are added. So if you make a server 4x faster it won't necessarily handle 4x the number of players. He has made performance improvements on the database so this may no longer be the case.

I only read a bit about him speeding up disk I/O 100x or so by implementing his own database engine a while back. Sounded like he knew his shit there. I would love to read his take on this.

CrazyEddie wrote:

Big O is a real bitch.

Friggin nerd.

ryanb · 2019-01-14 22:03:05

Actually I don't think we will ever get down to one server since he needs to take down half the servers at a time during an update. It would be awesome if updates could be done without needing to kill all family lines, but until then we need two servers.

Still, two servers are much better than five. We could probably handle the current peak across two beefy servers.

Gederian · 2019-01-14 22:03:47

You could easily scale this to billions of current users.

Run multiple master memcachedb (or any memory+disk backup database) servers.

The server code knows what server to query based on x/y coordinates requested.

You can scale this to every hundred tiles if you need.

CrazyEddie · 2019-01-14 22:18:04

Jason has said he would prefer to have everyone in one single world. Rearchitecting to use a shared database across multiple servers could be a significant time sink, but could also be a big step towards an important goal for him.

thundersen · 2019-01-14 22:59:05

CrazyEddie wrote:

Jason has said he would prefer to have everyone in one single world. Rearchitecting to use a shared database across multiple servers could be a significant time sink, but could also be a big step towards an important goal for him.

That would be the ideal solution, I agree. I would be AMAZED, if he would be able to pull this off all by himself at this stage of the project.

Tarr · 2019-01-16 16:56:09

At the very least he needs to pop this down to four servers in off peak hours with it preferably being two-three instead of five. Server 1/4 are running at what I would deem nearly unplayable numbers with lineage ban kicking in while also not being a high enough number to keep anything going due to the massive amount of Eves or gen 1+2 camps running around outside of the town. Without the fifth server going this would have been a nice 35/35/35/39 split which allows for multiple cities/camps to actually succeed.

betame · 2019-01-17 00:58:57

Thundersen's graphs show that something's not working as intended. The addition of server 5 on Jan 12 19:00 with total pop of 225 shouldn't have happened. Server 4's been added & removed at a couple of strange times too.
The intended behavior, as I undertsand:

ServerCount, addServerIfAbove#, removeServerIfBelow#
1,  60,   -
2,  140,  28
3,  220,  44
4,  300,  60
5,  380,  76

Last edited by betame (2019-01-17 01:00:05)

Greep · 2019-01-17 07:21:57

Huh, 28/44/60/76 feels extremely low. I would've expected like double or triple those values. That would mean it's seriously expected that servers can survive 76/5 = 15 population. Which is kinda ridiculous.

It's also kinda weird that server1 is always the lowest by a wide margin. That wouldn't give a great experience for new players as people who choose a custom server are people who know most about the game, and server one is just going to be eve hell w/ extreme newbie concentration.

Last edited by Greep (2019-01-17 07:26:04)

Jadelink · 2019-01-17 07:34:10

I do admit it seems like 10 servers would handle peaks fine, and not have the lines die off so regularly on 'smaller' servers.

Tarr · 2019-01-18 08:16:19

I should have gotten a picture on it but server 2 had 120 people on it during the servers updating. Seemed to play fine for me but obviously I'm just one person. With the server update we're back down to three servers running instead of five which gives us much nicer numbers overall (even if server 1 is a little lower but this is always the case anyways.)

Greep wrote:

That wouldn't give a great experience for new players as people who choose a custom server are people who know most about the game, and server one is just going to be eve hell w/ extreme newbie concentration.

Yeah Server 1 very easily spirals into Eve hell whenever the population drops too low. People all spawn into the one town and then proceed to get lineage banned out of it which kills the town due to no replacement players. At one point 12/16 players on the server all lived in one town which absolutely wrecked the place.

pein · 2019-01-19 06:37:49

3 servers today, the claytons on s2 had stable 20 girls at times which is kinda unbearable, like ginger update

seems that when the fire line died out, the shrour family got all the babies, i seen awbz people skipping around.

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#1 2019-01-14 14:14:24

Why have 5 servers active on off-peak hours?

#2 2019-01-14 14:20:17

Re: Why have 5 servers active on off-peak hours?

#3 2019-01-14 14:42:22

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#4 2019-01-14 14:51:22

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#5 2019-01-14 14:54:11

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#6 2019-01-14 14:58:32

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