Servers in Danger of Crashing RIGHT NOW!

[Eye_Gore]

its all just a bunch of 0's and 1's

Did you stay at a Holiday Inn last night?

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Yes let's assume every single player is going to pay for more retainers to get more space.

[Phenidate]

Each one of those 24 slots is another query to the backend databases---that is a big increase in traffic if you math it out to 400k+ users in real time.

I'm pretty sure each individual world server doesn't have 400k players on it. Thousands of concurrent users, maybe ten thousand at peak.

[Obysuca]

So compared to other MMOs, either our servers are crap (which is ridiculous when we have so many players paying monthly mind you)

Which makes you wonder where our money is really going. It can't be all for the "content", considering 3.0 is just 2.0 with dragons and everything that's come out is just rehashed and reskinned, not to mention the servers are crap, this is well known. Which also makes you think, they're not making as much off XIV as people think, especially when they keep trying to force paying more money for inventory(among other things) with reasons like this. I've seen far older mmos on worse servers that could handle a much larger amount of inventory than we get on XIV, yet they had no crashes due to it.

[Phenidate]

I'm a software engineer.

I can tell you right now that though we speak different languages, a japanese byte is the same size as an american byte is the same size as a zimbabwe byte.

edit: also I should be in there as Aika Niceboat, 1.0 player

What if adding extra slots increased the server load by multiples of the slots added? Maybe adding extra inventory slots is a big deal.

And yet they have enough space set aside for us to buy how many retainers again?

[Sylve]

the amount of data of everything you own could fit onto a grain of rice.

Except the problem is less one of storage and more communication.
That grain of rice is multiplied by 500k+, then sent back forth from server to client in a never ending stream.

Analogy!
1 car on the road makes roads seem huge right? Plenty of parking spaces at your destination too.
Now if there 500k cars on that same stretch of road, gets mighty clogged, no?

Servers don't crash when they're storing too much data, they crash when we're effectively DDoSing the servers everytime i we call up a retainer.

Edit, I'd like to also point out the rather extreme amount of free inventory space XIV has given us compared to other MMOs.
450 free inventory spaces between 2 Retainers and our player 'bags'. Not counting the 300 slots in our Armory.
Thats a rather significant number.

[Thyranne]

Except the problem is less one of storage and more communication.
That grain of rice is multiplied by 500k+, then sent back forth from server to client in a never ending stream.

Analogy!
1 car on the road makes roads seem huge right? Plenty of parking spaces at your destination too.
Now if there 500k cars on that same stretch of road, gets mighty clogged, no?

Servers don't crash when they're storing too much data, they crash when we're effectively DDoSing the servers everytime i we call up a retainer.

Edit, I'd like to also point out the rather extreme amount of free inventory space XIV has given us compared to other MMOs.
450 free inventory spaces between 2 Retainers and our player 'bags'.
Thats a rather significant number.

And they mentioned they store everything from server to database every 20 seconds so adding more things to it will slow down everything.

[Phenidate]

Servers don't crash when they're storing too much data, they crash when we're effectively DDoSing the servers everytime i we call up a retainer.

My point was to put a sense of scale of the data that would be moved around. So say we're using an outrageous .8KB of data for our bags. Just looking at our bags, and assuming that the server has to tell us every. single. time. we open our bag whats in it anew.

Well first off, I seriously doubt there's 500k players on Sargantas. Is there 500k players playing right now on Hyperion? No. A couple thousand may be on right now.

In addition, I don't think all thousands of players are all opening their bags and closing and opening them all the time are they? I'm pretty sure they're doing other things like fighting and questing and idling in idleshire doing the manderville.

Here's a fun thing: Lets say we hash the inventory. So we now have a number unique to the items in our bags and the order it's in. There's so many ways to do it so pick any one, it's really quite fast to do - computers are great at computing math.
My client saves the inventory info sent by the server - caching it if you will - client and server then generate a hash and check it against each other to make sure that the inventory I've got is the RIGHT inventory. Guess what? That hash number is frickin' tiny. You can fit it in a packet easy.

Now every time I open my bag, I load up my items from the client side, send just the hash to the server and query "hey does this match up with what you've got Mr. Server? If not then tell me what it should be" and we can take it from there.

[Sove92]

And they mentioned they store everything from server to database every 20 seconds so adding more things to it will slow down everything.

It's actually every 15 seconds.

[Phenidate]

That's apparently how they want us to cope - pay us more money for inventory space, we're not giving it to you for free because uh.. uhm... it'll crash the server!