Interesting population statistics per Wikipedia and suggested server reallocation

[kellyfcwalsh]

The japan servers also benefit with having all of their players relatively close. The architectural decision made by SE to have a single NA/EU datacenter is likely the source of much of their congestion issues. I can only imagine what SE's ISPs are trying to do to cope with this in Montreal.

Architecturally it would have made more sense to distribute the workload across multiple data centers. Have NA(east), NA(west), EU/UK, Oceania zone.
Put 25 servers in each NA datacenter, 50 in the EU centers(distribute across multiple DCs some in Britain, some on main continent) and 5 in the Oceania zone. That would quadruple the number of servers allocated to the current US/EU players base and still provide us with only half of the player to server ratio that the Japan player base currently enjoys.

Someone at SE might argue that would be expensive.
Your player base might argue that having millions of people return your product for a refund because it is unplayable is more expensive.

[kellyfcwalsh]

Also, somewhere someone over at SE made the decision that open beta would only last 2-3 days and it would occur a week before go live date. That was a serious mistake and something a competent software project manager/director should have caught. With only 2-3 days of open testing you didn't have time to baseline your clients usage patterns or provide real life stress testing. Now your window to correct the issues before full product launch is measured in hours instead of days/weeks and the required "fix" may require more than a few lines of code to fix what most system architects would characterize as "poor design decisions"