Oori
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Posted - 2004.04.28 19:12:00 -
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Originally by: kieron
A good portion of the downtime is used to clean up the databases used in the game. There are over 9 billion items in EVE right now and when even a small portion of these items are sold, trashed, recycled, etc., other items are created and the old ones need to be cleaned up.
The server logs are also checked for errors and issues. If these things were left to take care of once per week, the disks would quickly clutter up, lag would be a result, etc.
There is much more involved in the maint periods, but this is an idea of some of what happens behind the scenes.
As someone who worked as a DBA for a number of years with large databases (100Gb+), I can completely understand CCP's need for downtime. Considering the amount of queries that hit the database, they surely want to make sure their indexes are optimized. If their databases weren't optimized regularly query performance would degrade exponentially over time - and if you think you get lagged now you can't even imagine what would happen with a poorly indexed database. Corruption checking also needs to occur and in the event of a problem, the server needs exclusive access to the database to fix (previously mentioned) problem. Database backups surely also occur at some point and I would hope they occur throughout the day and then fully during downtime. Considering the amount of data that gets accessed/changed on a daily basis, I'm shocked that they only need an hour of downtime. One would hope that with the increase in accounts over time (esp. with E&B users) that the downtime needed remains constant. Good planning has surely accomplished this.
I have a feeling that the database platform choice was very price motivated. A more expensive DB platform could alleviate some of the issues listed above, but who would want to pay 10x more to play the game (so that CCP could afford a more expensive DB platform)? I'd rather have an hour downtime a day than pay ~$140/mo/account!
Regards, Oori
Side note: My experience is with Microsoft SQL - so I made the above assumptions based on such a platform. It would be interesting to know what database platform CCP was actually using...
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