Author Topic: New efforts!  (Read 7213105 times)

Codewalker

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26720 on: February 07, 2017, 04:47:41 PM »
Licensing costs would also be a chunk of it. You'd need Windows Server (probably Datacenter edition for a behemoth that large) licenses, and SQL Server per-core in order to support non-CAL users, which isn't cheap. You'd most likely need some sort of virtualization (ESX?) as I doubt Hyper-V would cut it, though from redname comments at the time, I suspect that the mapservers were extremely sensitive to latency and wouldn't play well with virtualization at all...

Because of that you might end up having to go with a blade system instead, which could increase your licensing costs as you can't bundle them together in one Datacenter license. Apparently the backend did not scale very well at all; so if you had more than a couple hundred players you'd have to split them up into multiple shards, making the solution that much more complex.

And sure, you can go with cheap NAS storage. Hope you got backups and that your players aren't getting too PO'd when there's downtime. I'd want something dual-controller at a bare minimum.

Hosting an MMO is a lot cheaper these days than it used to be for sure, but it still isn't what I'd call trivial.

Arcana

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26721 on: February 07, 2017, 06:00:12 PM »
I was mostly referring to the costs to host, in the context of discussing what it would cost to maintain an MMO that already exists and is paid for.

If you're going to host in a virtualized environment then there's no real option but Datacenter licenses.  The flip side is that Datacenter covers all the VMs on the same hardware which usually saves you some money.  Whether CoH itself would be virtualized is a separate question.  I don't think latency is as much of a problem as it used to be.  Latency-sensitive stuff like VOIP systems are virtualized all the time now (I've done it).

One place I know for a fact CoX had scaling issues was in the database: I crashed the beta server when I tried to do something that ultimately required a lot of database activity (a zone-wide power grant).  But compared to 2004, or even 2012, you could host the database server in an environment where the disks were all SSD, and on top of that most or all of the entire active databases were cached into memory.  You combine that with memory-clustered synchronous writes and I don't think that would be a problem today.  However, this is more a question of how you might make it better today than it was before, not whether it is possible to host something comparable to what existed before.

I don't think I specifically said I would host an MMO on cheap NAS storage.  However, on that subject there are ways to make cheap NAS storage extremely fault tolerant in a virtual environment.  You can continuously replicate them with ZFS snapshots.  You can use disk replication like HAST or DRBD.  You can also do some interesting things with dual port SCSI.  You can even get zero-complexity redundancy by simply using two high performance NAS pods and provisioning your virtual machines to software mirror across them.  Although I would not recommend that for ultra high disk performance windows use cases, because Windows software mirroring sucks.  For high availability Windows with only moderate to high disk i/o requirements it works, and it works extremely well for Linux and BSD environments where software mirroring is extremely efficient.

Ultimately, the generic statement about how difficult or costly it would be to host an MMO environment has to be qualified by the scale of the workload.  Of course, anyone can host an MMO environment if the simultaneous player count is three.  It gets interesting if the count is three hundred.  Its a real problem if its three thousand.  When its thirty thousand, now you're talking about nitty-gritty details becoming important.  I think somewhere between three hundred and three thousand the problem stops being trivial and starts requiring targeted solutions.  Between three thousand and thirty thousand things get speculative without concrete system requirements.  But I do have a datapoint, and that is that NCSoft was doing this in 2012 with circa 2010 hardware and it wasn't ridiculous in scale.  A rack row of 2010 hardware is about two racks of 2016 hardware.  Nothing NCSoft was doing with CoX in 2012 would be immune to Moore's Law that I'm aware of.  And that places strong limits on the costs to replicate today.

Tubbius

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26722 on: February 08, 2017, 01:07:05 PM »
Tubbius observes that this page is 1337.

:)

Keldian

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26723 on: February 08, 2017, 02:36:47 PM »
Tubbius observes that this page is 1337.

:)
Beat me to it.

Tahquitz

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26724 on: February 08, 2017, 05:52:21 PM »
Heh, 535 is a long way from 1337.  (Oh, right, 20 per page... Forgot.)
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Korbian

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26725 on: February 08, 2017, 11:43:30 PM »
Yeah, I just wanted to post on the 1337 page, too.   :P

Angel Phoenix77

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26726 on: February 09, 2017, 01:16:55 AM »
Yeah, I just wanted to post on the 1337 page, too.   :P
Same :)
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MWRuger

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26727 on: February 09, 2017, 01:25:07 AM »
I said I could run it for very low costs.  I did not say I wouldn't charge you lots to do it. :p

What it costs to do and what people charge you to do it are two different things.  And in hosting, those things are practically independent things.

Also, when you run datacenters you start to think completely differently about costs; at least I do.  A $25,000 server sounds like an expensive thing, but I don't see the number 25,000 anymore.  I see the number 730.  That's the monthly lease payment on a $25,000 server (3yr term).  A 2016 $25k server is a behemoth 40 core (two socket) Xeon with 768GB of ram.  It is possible that is more computing power than all of City of Heroes launched with in 2004.  Based on what they could possibly have been running in 2012 vs what you can buy today, it could probably support several hundred simultaneous players running the last server iteration.

Bandwidth is probably a bigger concern than hardware or hosting costs.  But then again, 1gig and 10gig internet is available for thousands of dollars a month.  City of Heroes needs like 20-50k per player, so even a couple thousand players is probably less than 100mb/sec of internet, not including client downloads.  That's hundreds, maybe a couple grand a month of redundant BGP interconnects.

Stuff just keeps getting cheaper if you know what you're doing.  My 200 Terabyte NAS configurations are probably going to become obsolete in 2017, replaced with 300 TB capacity NAS configurations.  For basically peanuts.


Well I wish you'd do it. I'd gladly pay for 3 accounts at 15 dollars a month, not including what I might spend in the store.

I know it was all hypothetical, but it doesn't change what I would spend to play CoH again.
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Sinistar

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26728 on: February 09, 2017, 02:01:01 AM »
Yeah, I just wanted to post on the 1337 page, too.   :P

Me too
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Floride

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26729 on: February 09, 2017, 03:08:15 AM »
Tubbius observes that this page is 1337.

:)
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Nyx Nought Nothing

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26730 on: February 09, 2017, 04:10:42 AM »
Heh, 535 is a long way from 1337.  (Oh, right, 20 per page... Forgot.)
i have the same issue.
So far so good. Onward and upward!

rookery.

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26731 on: February 09, 2017, 01:03:00 PM »
Im gonna post on the 1337 page too!

Twisted Toon

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26732 on: February 09, 2017, 06:10:43 PM »
Im gonna post on the 1337 page too!

I'm going to wait 802 pages. THEN, I'll post on the 1337 page.  :P
Hope never abandons you, you abandon it. - George Weinberg

Hope ... is not a feeling; it is something you do. - Katherine Paterson

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Vee

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26733 on: February 09, 2017, 07:26:47 PM »
I'm going to wait 802 pages. THEN, I'll post on the 1337 page.  :P

See you're missing out that way. Should switch post/page after this page so you get to have 2 1337 pages.

Codewalker

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26734 on: February 09, 2017, 10:44:37 PM »
I'm going to wait 802 pages. THEN, I'll post on the 1337 page.  :P

Bwahaha.

Arcana

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26735 on: February 10, 2017, 12:57:19 AM »
I'm going to wait 802 pages. THEN, I'll post on the 1337 page.  :P

I'm going to wait 4591 more posts and then post, and no one will know why.

Paragon Avenger

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26736 on: February 10, 2017, 04:14:56 AM »
I'm not going to post on this page or page 1337 or on page 500 and whatever.
That'll teach them.

Power Gamer

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26737 on: February 10, 2017, 05:38:59 AM »
This is a post-post posting.
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doctorlurkin

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26738 on: February 10, 2017, 12:29:40 PM »
I'm just posting so I can hang out with all the cool people.
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Twisted Toon

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Re: New efforts!
« Reply #26739 on: February 10, 2017, 05:02:06 PM »
I'm going to wait 4591 more posts and then post, and no one will know why.
I didn't mean thgat I wasn't going to post at all. I was just going to count my posts on the 1337 page as being around the 66,800 range of posts.

even if someone changes my posts/page settnig...

Bwahaha.

Okay. Now I'll just wait 40,115 posts and post on the real 1337 page.  :P
Hope never abandons you, you abandon it. - George Weinberg

Hope ... is not a feeling; it is something you do. - Katherine Paterson

Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy. - Cynthia Nelms