Planned downtime: Moving to a new server

[loftar]

so, a pretty major one then

I don't quite know how major, though. The bandwidth and RAM are obviously huge upgrades (though the RAM upgrade will be countered in part by the increase in memory usage due to pointers being 64-bit), but it will be interesting to observe how much greater the CPU and I/O are. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the server is still single-threaded, so the quad-core stuff will only matter in as far as it allows other processes on the system to preempt the game server less.

The CPU in the new server runs at "only" 2.6 GHz; less than 20% faster in pure clock-speed than the current CPU, but I've no idea how much the cache (512 KB L2 per core on the current CPU; 256 KB L2 per core + 8 MB L3 on the new CPU) and the difference in microarchitecture (K9 vs. Nehalem) will affect performance. The switch to the current Athlon64 CPU (from a previous Athlon XP (K7, that is)) made much more of a difference than I would ever have guessed, so I am very excited to find out how this Nehalem thingie performs.

The new server also has two mirrored disks, which should improve read performance. And, of course, the greater amount of RAM allows for more block caching, which might be really great for the Haven server (especially when saving maps back to disk). I would still have preferred to keep one of the disks dedicated to game data, but I guess the redundancy (and extra read speed) is worth something. :)

[Sotsa]

woopwooopwooop \o/

[spectacle]

And there was much rejoicing!

I wonder how many people will be playing during peak time now, with less lag to keep them away.

[darkulrich]

Congrats! No excuses not do donate now

[DigDog]

This made my day. And probably my week.

[jorb]

The end of an era! Good riddance. Big shout outs to all of you who donated. Let's hope this keeps us afloat for a while.

[Lahrmid]

oh my gawd

*nerdgasm*

Edit: Also... Will my batch of 68 now eating silkworms survive this?

[mvgulik]

Good luck with move.

Will my batch of 68 now eating silkworms survive this?

Yes. The game will just continue from the point it was stopped, when its started at the new server again. Or: server(game) down time has no effect on the in-game time.

[Potjeh]

Awesomeness. Any guesstimate on how many online players the server can handle now?

As I've mentioned elsewhere, the server is still single-threaded, so the quad-core stuff will only matter in as far as it allows other processes on the system to preempt the game server less.

I understand that making the whole thing multithreaded would be a shitton of work, but how hard would it be to move decay to it's own thread?

[Granger]

As an aside, Jorb will be able to surf the interwebz and download pr0n again, but I hardly think that's relevant to anything.

I'm happy to hear this