Quote Originally Posted by Grupp View Post
I've worked in data centers for most of my career and I'm an avid gamer. I can say that it doesn't appear to be a server problem or a network capacity problem since the lag is so low. That leads me to believe it's simply a metric problem. Or to be more accurate a philosophy. What I think is going on is Square Enix is keeping the numbers of players per server low in order to keep playing quality high. the servers are being slightly UNDER utilized intentionally By SE. For what reason I have no idea. But I have about 20 years experience giving me this hunch.
I completely agree Grupp. I also have and currently work in a data center, one in which we handle way more than 5000 concurrent connections at one time without any issues... In many ways, this was quite simply poor planning and a terrible authentication/queue management architecture.

This could have been resolved with not only player queues, but also the basic concept of proper load balancing and using appliances to handle the authentication process ie (netscalers, F5, etc, etc.) On top of which they could have easily setup a zoned master server environment.

With the appliance handling the login portions and handing off the queue work to the master servers to find the server with the lowest load... problem solved. This is not a new process at all and in fact is done time and time again. In case they would like to brush up Exit games has a great doc about this:

http://doc.exitgames.com/photon-server/LoadBalancing/