Megan Maynard
Minmatar
Rep-X
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Posted - 2010.08.26 00:56:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: CCP Veritas
Originally by: Ix Forres
Great facial expression, good dev blog. How many major fixes have come about since the introduction of the thin client platform, and when was this made internally available? What were your methods of debugging EVE before it was available?
Thanks~
The thin clients matured enough for usage roughly a month ago, and while it took a fair bit of time to get them to do useful things, much has come from them already. It's hard to say how many major fixes have come from their usage so far, since that's dependent on your definition of major. Certainly most of what I talk about in this blog was made possible in the timeframe it happened via thin clients, and there are some nice optimizations coming down the pipe as well that originated in controlled thin client setups.
Before the thin clients we did load testing by getting as many warm bodies to log in to test servers, both internally and with the public mass tests. This type of testing is fantastic for finding things you didn't think to test, but not very useful for the kind of specific drill-down testing that I've been talking about above. Removing the need to use mass tests for that purpose has been very liberating, both in that we can do more of it and that we can focus on higher level information during mass tests.
It's nice to see you guys getting into the realm of what us engineers do quite often. (Use smaller simulations to gauge performance of a larger system.)
A couple questions:
1. Do you use thin clients on tranquility before/after patches to verify function? If not, look into it. It's a great way to run thousands of tests without someone needing to be there. (Because you can simply look at the results as you have time to catch the little things.)
2. Are there plans to incorporate a gui specifically for running multiple thin clients all at once? It sounds weird, having a gui to run another set of code that controls essentially another gui, but I like to think of it as the "turbo" button on my old N64 3rd party controller. 
Originally by: F'nog
Originally by: Stareatthesun
No no no ... Polaris is where CCP keeps the death star that will destroy eve when the servers shut down.
Thankfully I've got Interceptors trained to V. S |