Vertical scaling up of VM

[Fallout47]

This is never going to happen. Due to the community attempt to create a super server Orien is top-heavy with exactly the kind of characters that contribute to lag.

Super server = 600+ players. MMO = miniscule members online

 

[Baahb3]

The DDO lag problems are in the code not the infrastructure.

It cannot be all code. Opening Quests, moving in public spaces, interacting with NPCs and Banks. All of this should not matter what past lives or as you call them 'systems' you have engaged with.

I don't know what the problem is and speculating about it without seeing logs, both server and network, is folly.

The problem is the silence we get from those WITH access to those logs. When we go this long without any mention of ANY work being done to improve performance, it is not good. It leads to this, endless and information-void speculation. It also leads to player angst. We would not like lag any more but some communication on where they are at with it, for me at least, would abate my anger over it...at least a little.

 

[Mordenkainen]

It cannot be all code. Opening Quests, moving in public spaces, interacting with NPCs and Banks. All of this should not matter what past lives or as you call them 'systems' you have engaged with.

I don't know what the problem is and speculating about it without seeing logs, both server and network, is folly.

The problem is the silence we get from those WITH access to those logs. When we go this long without any mention of ANY work being done to improve performance, it is not good. It leads to this, endless and information-void speculation. It also leads to player angst. We would not like lag any more but some communication on where they are at with it, for me at least, would abate my anger over it...at least a little.

Which means they've done the $$$ calculations and found it to be impossible to fix. Or attempted to get permission from the higher ups, aka Enad7 and was denied several times.

Just gotta play the game as-is.

 

[Lori]

I'll just say

How come a HC server with double the amount of peak players doesn't lag as much as Orien does?
Exactly.

 

[Sylvado]

It cannot be all code. Opening Quests, moving in public spaces, interacting with NPCs and Banks. All of this should not matter what past lives or as you call them 'systems' you have engaged with.

I don't know what the problem is and speculating about it without seeing logs, both server and network, is folly.

The problem is the silence we get from those WITH access to those logs. When we go this long without any mention of ANY work being done to improve performance, it is not good. It leads to this, endless and information-void speculation. It also leads to player angst. We would not like lag any more but some communication on where they are at with it, for me at least, would abate my anger over it...at least a little.

I have no problems in public spaces, in fact, likely because I play solo, I rarely have any lag at all.

 

[GrizzlyOso]

I'll just say

How come a HC server with double the amount of peak players doesn't lag as much as Orien does?
Exactly.

Even this doesn’t seem as cut and dry as you’re making it out to be. Things that should only be calculated once / rarely should affect lag very differently than procs that happen constantly.

Ie people point to past lives but I don’t really get that from a systems point of view .

To me it’d be much more likely in that scenario that simply put a bunch of low level characters can’t perform nearly the same number of actions / which for calculations than high level characters.

All the stacking systems that high level chars get, sure. My fvs at cap can trigger at least 50 direct calcs in a second, not to mention the pathing of the whole dungeon to a kill spot, and if they all have things that trigger off of them a it’s a lot more than a first life char swinging a bat or throwing a heal.

 

[Genkiba]

I'll just say

How come a HC server with double the amount of peak players doesn't lag as much as Orien does?
Exactly.

Because HC players don't have 100+ lives...

 

[Mindos]

not to mention the pathing of the whole dungeon to a kill spot,

I would have dungeon alert change quest completion to make all aggroed/leashed mobs a required kill. And make the mobs leash back much, much sooner. And have every aggroed/leashed mob have 10x all stats/attributes. Slow it down, stop gather all and kill, prevent all that pathing AI. Force interaction at a steady or less intensive on servers case.

 

[Ying]

The idea that the data center infrastructure is a major cause of lag is ridiculous at this point.

Pure conjecture. I've been in IT 30 years with a decade in architecture and software engineering each. But I don't have the hubris to claim I know the definitive bottlenecks with an information system I know nothing about.

 

[Br4d]

Pure conjecture. I've been in IT 30 years with a decade in architecture and software engineering each. But I don't have the hubris to claim I know the definitive bottlenecks with an information system I know nothing about.

If you've been in IT for 30 years and you've played DDO for the last 15-ish you know exactly what the deal is.

I've been in IT for 43 years at this point and it's obvious to me.

When the companies that I worked for, including a major Fortune 500 company, had lag and connectivity issues it was 75% likely it was a flaw in the code in the applications in question. When the dev groups fixed the code the problem went away.

Network management is highly commoditized at this point and data center failures are 95% hardware related.

 

[GrizzlyOso]

If you've been in IT for 30 years and you've played DDO for the last 15-ish you know exactly what the deal is.

I've been in IT for 43 years at this point and it's obvious to me.

When the companies that I worked for, including a major Fortune 500 company, had lag and connectivity issues it was 75% likely it was a flaw in the code in the applications in question. When the dev groups fixed the code the problem went away.

Network management is highly commoditized at this point and data center failures are 95% hardware related.

You know 100 - 75 is 25 and yet you’re saying it’s crazy to say someone doesnt know ? Aren’t you saying the same thing ?

 

[Lori]

Because HC players don't have 100+ lives...

Do you really believe the arrays of lives aren't pre-calculated and cached? Do you also really believe adding 100 numbers 400 times has any noticable effect on performance? Then I guess you've never written and benchmarked any code, which is fine, but don't assume 400 calculations are responsible for that amount of lag, not even per second.

If you've noticed HC lags when it's fresh, then, gradually HC performance improves to the point of the occasional lag spike, but nothing nearly as large some of the past weekends on Orien. Not even close.

This company's motto is: The house is on fire, let's build more floors.
There are so many issues that need fixing, and they don't give a ****.
Least effort, maximum profits.
They haven't even bothered to fix cogs quest exits. How old is that expansion now?
Instead of removing those quest chains, like in sharn or ES, where you need to run chapter after chapter, they continue to add them, vechna unleased is so.
So no matter how often we say what we say they don't ******* care.
They're satisfied with what they have.
And Orien will stay on this low performance server as long as it can.

 

[Bjond]

I don't have the hubris to claim I know the definitive bottlenecks with an information system I know nothing about.

Heh. The why is unknown, but even c. 2000 client/server could handle the load DDO "should" have.

IMHO, SSG knows what to do and quite badly doesn't want to do it; all these recent tiny (and mostly ineffective) performance hacks cry out, "We're scrambling to avoid fixing the real issues".

 

[nix]

I'll just say

How come a HC server with double the amount of peak players doesn't lag as much as Orien does?
Exactly.

most likely because most characters on HC are newer and have less history (inventory / past lives / whatever) to keep track of

 

[GrizzlyOso]

most likely because most characters on HC are newer and have less history (inventory / past lives / whatever) to keep track of

…. Maybe ? This kind of stuff shouldn’t be causing that much load . You don’t load it very often.

 

[AMess]

blerg, I guess we're role playing at being SSG game architects tonight (I put on my +1 goggles of copying [Reading Glasses] and my +2 gauntlets of mighty pasting[Carpal Tunnel Wrist Brace]).

well, i suspect the long upgrade last week was a code base rollback...pure conjecture of course, but the game seems to have reverted to a higher lag state, when you factor in the recent outages, its possible we were overheating something and dev were told to ease up at the margins.

how does an extended upgrade lead to worse performance, or rather why, assuming the change was intentional.

I hear past life considerations for lag and hardcore as proof, maybe, but also in lower heroics, where most compute is for hardcore, there is simply less happening at a slower speed. also, consider recent epic destiny changes where it seems like everyone gets an AOE epic strike now...i dunno, feels like a classic battle of compute vs demand...sure code base changes may help, but there's no reason for SSG to make a drastic investment and if existing resources could fix it, they would have, but it's gotten slowly worse...maybe we can work out a game-share-app, where we schedule who gets to play when and for how long.

 

[PraetorPlato]

There's too much code, too many overlapping systems and too much snapshotting going on for the game to run smoothly unless you are on a very low impact character.

Snapshotting should probably help performance? constant recomputation seems bad

 

[deuxanes]

Without details about how the software was programmed (i.e. architecture, implementation details) or how the backend looks like it’s all just guessing. It's just futile.

 

[Striga]

Meanwhile, a recent photo of vertical scaling in DDO's datacenter.

 

[Sylvado]

So many experts, not sure why the company I work for pays thousands of people for IT support when they could just come here to get people that could solve any problem in a day.