Servers in Danger of Crashing RIGHT NOW!

[Phenidate]

Thats right, if everyone were to buy a retainer, the servers could come crashing down on us right now according to YoshiP.

Each of us getting 175 extra inventory slots would be just too much for the server to handle.

Q71. After 3.0 launched, my inventory and Armoury have been super full. Do you plan on adding more inventory space?

A71. I understand everyone’s request, but since additional inventory space would increase the data transmitted, there is a risk for server crashes, so this isn’t something we can do right away. We’re optimizing aspects with every patch, so we will continue to look into this for the future. Until then, we would like to add a feature that stores and retrieves whole gear sets to and from retainers, and make other quality-of-life changes to retainers.

Sit down with your engineers and have a nice long talk about why giving 24 slots to the players would be too much for the server to handle.

Maybe ask them what's going to happen when that returning players campaign kicks off and thousands of inventories SLAM the servers?

Maybe ask how they plan to handle the game getting any new players, adding 450 massive inventory slots each.

Apparently we just can't spare the space!

[Tuathaa]

Might be time for a server upgrade then.

[Feyniphia]

So they admit their servers are piss poor and cant handle that? how lame.

[Rose-Wild]

It's just an excuse to make us rent retainers.

[Nghthawk]

People just need to manage their inventory spaces better.

[Eye_Gore]

Well then I have to wonder is this the real limitation and not the whole console/PC debate that always comes up?

[Raist]

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.

[Phenidate]

So compared to other MMOs, either our servers are crap (which is ridiculous when we have so many players paying monthly mind you) or our inventory is so horribly innefficient that even flavor of the month korean F2P games do it better than FFXIV.

Let me break out some mumbo jumbo to put into context the amount of data we're talking about in an ideal inventory:
Every item in your bag is just an item ID and a quantity, that's about all the server needs to know and tell your client. It knows what item it is by looking up the id. It knows how much you have by the quantity.
All the items info, graphics etc are stored client side. Using the item ID it looks up the graphics, descriptions, etc from the data on your computer.

We know that items are stored client side since sites like XIVDB regularly datamine it from the client.
So thats all an inventory stored in a database should be - the item id of each item in each slot, and a number signifying it's quantity.

Do you want to know how big an item ID and a number would be? They can both be numbers, and if we're going to be extravagant they're full on integers. 32bits each. So each slot would take up two integers.
How big is an integer? 32 bits.
How many slots do we have in our bag? 100. 175 per retainer.
2 numbers for each slot, that's 64 bits.
100 slots that's 6400 bits.
Each retainer by the way would be 11200.
Bear with me now: there's 8 bits in a byte. Our bag is 800 bytes. Our retainer is 1400 bytes.
Let me put that in terms of a quantity you may know: kilobytes. A KB is 1000 bytes, so our bag is .8KB, Each retainer is 1.4KB.
Our bags plus two retainers is 3.6 kilobytes.

To put that into perspective, a 1TB hard drive holds around 1,000,000,000 kilobytes. So that's what, 50 bucks to accommodate 277,777,777.778 players. I don't think we have 278 million players right now.

Want to know something else? I used waaaaaaaaaaay too much data for the quantity, since the most you can have is 99 of any item. We can just use a byte (8 bits) for the quantity. The item id being an integer by the way, gives us enough space to identify 4,294,967,296 unique items. We could make the item ID even smaller to accommodate say, 2 billionish instead.

Simply put, you could fit the inventory into an even smaller number of bits than what I gave above if you were to optimize it.

"Hey Phenidate, whats all this mean to me?"

Well it means that if the people who engineered the inventory system were trying to be good engineers and not waste space, the amount of data of everything you own could fit onto a grain of rice.

[MikaKrystel]

It sounds like the database optimisation/efficiency is aimed at many players performing simultaneous searches, instead of how players search their own inventories.

If the developers had no choice but to pick between optimising for all players or optimising for individuals searching their retainers etc., then of course they're going to focus on the former.

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

[Musashidon]

snip

o: cool which person in the credits are you?

since you know exactly how much each resource costs you obviously made them right?