Welcome to Elgea (New Server)

Message Topic Search Topic Options Post Reply Create New Topic Printable Version Translate Topic

   ** Server migration complete.  elgea.illyriad.co.uk is up and running ***

Hi all,
As many of you have experienced, the current Illyriad server uk1 is beginning to run into some slowness issues, which are visible in the forms of chat lag, login slowness, queuing things up (and completing them) suffering from delays, occasional weird popup errors and general sluggishness on the interface.

This lag is a factor of a substantial growth in the number of new players joining the game and staying with it - so this is a good cause for a bad symptom! 

These slowness issues are not related to the total number of players in the game but, instead, are caused by the larger numbers of concurrent users (people using the same interface at the same time) - especially true of those using global chat, which is unexpectedly more data intensive than is practical for sustaining continued levels of concurrent-player growth.

Whilst we have a plan to optimise chat (and hive it off to the cloud) as part of the private chat/player-run chatrooms future expansion, we do need to ensure, right now, that the current server can continue its growth without manifesting or deepening some of the lag issues we currently experience.

So, in the short-term, we're throwing some hardware at it.

We're building a new gameserver

Compared to our existing uk1 server it's a much bigger beast.   

Astonishing as it may seem (yes, we are *that* good at coding ) the current uk1 server hardware is 3 years old, dual-quad core (8 worker threads), 8GB Ram box  with not very fast hard disc drives - which isn't actually much better specced than some of today's home PCs.

The new box is a hyperthreaded, Xeon Westmere dual-hex core, capable of simultaneously running 24 worker threads, with 64GB Ram and solid-state hard drives.

It's a very substantial step up from where we are.

We're going to *MOVE* all the players and data from uk1 onto this new server

Please carefully note the word "move".  This is not "Server 2", or a new landmass - it's the identical server with the same people on it doing the same things, but just on a bigger box.

This move will mean some scheduled downtime to:

a) stop the flow of new "queue orders" (ie builds, research etc)
b) pause the queues
c) back-up the database
d) copy the database to the new server
e) restore the database on the new server
f) test and put back live

Restarting the server will process, in the correct order, all the outstanding "unprocessed" queue items.  

In practical terms - when the new server is back up and running everything should be as it was had you simply not logged in for the downtime period.

At the moment, the server hardware build has been completed, and we're currently installing the DB components and optimising the server environment resource allocation; we'll then complete securing the install, do a test run from an old database backup, and then we should be ready to go.

The new server is based in the USA, not the UK

We're moving the server closer to where the majority of our customers are.  

We don't expect any noticable latency increase for UK/European or ROW players especially as we will continue to serve much of the more bandwidth-intensive things such as gfx from the UK image server (for those items that aren't coming out of your browser cache).

The new server will have a new name

The new server's name is "ELGEA".

elgea.illyriad.co.uk will be the URL

We will redirect traffic from uk1.illyriad.co.uk to elgea.illyriad.co.uk, as well as pass the DNS A records over (so - after a couple of days - your old links to specific pages on uk1.illyriad.co.uk will work correctly again).

For those who are interested, Elgea is the name of the main continent of Illyriad - the one that is currently represented on the world map.  

This does, of course, imply that other continents will be released over time for further concurrent player capacity increases, and are likely to be linked in some ways via the oceans.  

Before the forum explodes with passionate, err, debate on how new servers should be implemented  the exact mechanism of how multiple gameworld servers will work is still very much being thought about, but is a very much less pressing issue than increasing our current, concurrent, capacity on the existing server - and becomes even less pressing once we've moved onto Elgea as that will buy us quite some time via the concurrency increase (especially once chat has migrated off the game environment).

That's about it for the moment - questions welcome.

Edited by GM Stormcrow - 21 Nov 2011 at 07:14