FFXIV ARR is 3 this year, Server upgrades?

[Magis]

Yes, Indeed. However, as Yoshi-P and others have told us time and again the memory budget for character data is very tight. That is partially due to constraints on the client end, but mainly due to the constant write back of character data to the database every 15 (It may actually be even more frequent than that, I can't remember, but 15 seconds has stuck in my head) seconds to provide solid data integrity and rollback support. You could quadruple the number of options for character appearance, and double inventory, and most clients (including the PS3) wouldn't care. However increasing the number of options for character appearance and doubling the inventory would have a large impact on the amount of data each character comprises of, and is being continually re-written to the database. The current architecture supports a certain amount of data in the character, you have to upgrade the actual hardware to significantly alter than bandwidth to support more data in the character.

Me and a few other programmers theorized that SE is probably storing the whole game state in memory and saving it all at once in one go every [x] seconds. This is probably split on a per zone basis (IE: S. Gridania is handling all players inside it, while E. Thanalan handles those). Still, other than gamestate data (position, parameterSave, statuses, etc), why would you ever save a character's appearance over and over? Why would you save the inventory over and over? Should that not be done when those event trigger?

Another interesting quirk of the XIV protocol: All game commands must take a minimum 0x20byte overhead for headers. Won't get into details (since it will prob piss off SE) but for items for example, the game wastes 0x20 bytes per item setting slots. Interestingly 1.0 did this more efficiently but had it's own issues with being convoluted.