A common trouble from massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) is the “lag” that buy cs3 master collection cheap seems to always happen whenever there is a large concentration of player in the buy cs3 master collection cheap same area. Users complain endlessly about this issues, citing “there’s no reason the service could be this bad, ” or ranting that their game provider, who is “racking in several tens of millions of dollars per month, yet could not improve their service even after 2 years.”

The most common rant is probably “upgrade the server!!” But in many cases the server (cluster) is not the issue, it is the network that is being exhausted. Let’s examine the case a bit closely.

Consider an MMORPG environment where there is only 1 “zone” and buy cs3 master collection cheap all the players are always in the same area and requires attention from buy cs3 master collection cheap the server and network resources. In a real MMORPG this is buy cs3 master collection cheap not likely the case but the scope of this writing is buy cs3 master collection cheap focused in situations where large amount of users present in the buy cs3 master collection cheap same area. We will see how the resource have to scale to buy cs3 master collection cheap accommodate larger number of players than normal.

We’re discounting the buy cs3 master collection cheap overhead of data processing to look at the network performance and buy cs3 master collection cheap scaling issues only.

Suppose each player needs to update 1KB (one kilo byte) of information with the server every 2s. This is only about 512 bytes / second for each user, a buy cs3 master collection cheap very conservative assumption. With home residential cable connection at 3.2MBit, you buy cs3 master collection cheap are downloading at 400KB/s or about 400,000 bytes a second, for comparison.

Consider an buy cs3 master collection cheap area where there are 100 players all with the need to buy cs3 master collection cheap update his status with the server and require the server to buy cs3 master collection cheap update him with the status of the 99 other players around him.

Each player are sending in 0.5 KB/s to the server. In total there are 50KB/s input to server.
For each of these 2KB data packages (not packet) received the buy cs3 master collection cheap server has to process and update the other 99 player with what buy cs3 master collection cheap it receives. This implies the server is sending out almost 100*99*0.5 = 4,950KB/s or 39.6MBit . This is very manageable for even an OC-3 line.

Now look at 500 players. This number is buy cs3 master collection cheap easily achieve when there is an in-game “event” of some sort. With just 5 times the buy cs3 master collection cheap users than the previous case we’re looking at the server serving 500*499*0.5 = 124,750 KB per second (998Mbit/s). Compare to buy cs3 master collection cheap the case of 100 users this 5 times increase in users has buy cs3 master collection cheap resulted in a 25 times increase in bandwidth required. Thus the buy cs3 master collection cheap amount of bandwidth required scales with the square of number of users.

As you buy cs3 master collection cheap can see with 500 players, who only need to update around 500 bytes of data to buy cs3 master collection cheap the server every second, the server already exceed the capability of an buy cs3 master collection cheap OC-12 line. This is also for just ONE realm with the buy cs3 master collection cheap spike concentration of users. I highly doubt any game company reserves a buy cs3 master collection cheap full duplex OC-12 line for each of its realm server (or server cluster for one realm).

So make sure they can buy cs3 master collection cheap always handle 500 users in one place at a time they’d need a faster connection! But upgrading an buy cs3 master collection cheap OC-12 line to OC-24 or OC-48 is really nothing like upgrading your buy cs3 master collection cheap home cable service from bare minimum to a Deluxe fully loaded package. It is buy cs3 master collection cheap really huge money we’re talking here.

Say they’re upgrading the buy cs3 master collection cheap connection to supports 500 player at a time. And what buy cs3 master collection cheap good will this do? Due to buy cs3 master collection cheap the increased connectivity of the server the number of players on the buy cs3 master collection cheap realm is also increased (to bear the cost of the new connection). This has resulted in another “big event” with 1000 users! which means it’d need almost 4Gbit of bandwidth… and so on.

The game company has buy cs3 master collection cheap to balance the expenses and maximize profit. They sample the data in their virtual world to buy cs3 master collection cheap see normally how many players would be in the same area at the buy cs3 master collection cheap same time and try to accommodate that. They are usually “nice” and buy cs3 master collection cheap anticipate some overhead. But it would not make good business sense to buy cs3 master collection cheap have a network ready to serve 500 player at tremendous cost while “on average” there are buy cs3 master collection cheap rarely more than 100 concentrated at any location in the buy cs3 master collection cheap “world.”

So next time you’re going to complain “server sucks” trust me it’s not going to change, not for your 15US a month.