Dear SE, please unlock Balmung

[Raist]

Login queues don't happen because of people sitting AFK... they happen because of an overload of concurrent connections passing through the lobby servers to the world servers. Go back and read the lodestone posts I linked in my last post. They are talking about issues with a mass influx of simultaneous logins, as in large numbers of people logging in at the same time. Once you are logged in, you have your two persistent connections and you are done (bear in mind that many servers have default connection limits on the order of tens of thousands--MS-SQL defaults to just over 32k, IIS has a theoretic combined pool of up to 16 MILLION). But during the login process, there is a flood of multiple connections pulling up all the character and environment data in one big pull (also comes into play when you zone as well). That consumes the resources that ultimately trigger the queuing---pulling all that data up during the login process, which is where they've had to put the harsh restrictions on concurrent connections. It's not that much of an issue managing all those that are already logged in, as they are running on their own separate pool from what the lobby/login process has to work with.

Keep in mind that at launch, there wasn't a division between servers for the login like we have now. You logged in on say, .25, and played on .25 as well--and were dealing with a hard limit of 5000. Have to remember also that each lobby server is managing the logins to an assigned group of worlds (each of which is actually spread out across a cluster of servers as well). But, those front end servers are dedicated to managing that process entirely up front, and then we get handed off to the world service server for our chosen world--and those worlds are now spread out across more servers and able to handle much more active players than before. Previously, it was all being done by the one server but now it is a distributed load. In the case of Balmung, it's lobby server is potentially bearing the greatest load of all of them though, as it is the only one managing access to 13 world services. The others are managing 11 or less:

http://www.arrstatus.com/