Archived from groups: alt.games.coh (
More info?)
Dark Tyger <darktiger@somewhere.net> wrote in
news:87ud519s1s2amapve3bs14fmm03lf04vn0@4ax.com:
> On Fri, 08 Apr 2005 19:48:02 GMT, Marc Bissonnette
> <dragnet@internalysis.com> wrote:
>
>>Shenanigunner <shenanigunner@NOdgathSPAM.kom> wrote in
>>news:Xns96325B7D4E8B7nitropressatnitrosyn@216.168.3.44:
>>
>>> "The Black Guardian" <blakgard@aol.com> wrote:
>>>> Indeed. Especially when you consider the amount of information that
>>>> Cryptic stores about each character.
>>>
>>> So it's a whole megabyte per character - which is probably 10x the
>>> real amount. Remember, they don't store lengthy descriptions; I'd
>>> bet that a complete character appearance, including all costume
>>> details, fits into less than a single kilobyte.
>>
>>Ummm... No.
>>
>>(I'm a DB/CGI programmer, so I'm not pulling numbers out of my bum
>>
>>There's a *ton* of information stored per character, that would take
>>far more than a kilobyte.
>>
>>Just off the top of my head:
>>
>>All of the costume options (x 4 slots)
>>Aura type, intensity, etc (x 4 slots)
>>Cape type, style, colours (x 4 slots)
>>All contacts met
>>All contact missions done, active, status, etc
>>All maps, explored vs unexplored
>>influence
>>powers, enhancements
>>temp powers
>>clue data
>>arc data
>>SG data
>>mobs killed data
>>power use data (this might not be stored per char, but states has said
>>he mines this for balancing issues)
>>
>>and a ton more that I'm not even aware of.
>
> All of this can be condensed easily into a line of text per item at
> most. Several of these can be condensed into 5 characters or less.
>
> Costume: A line per slot: <slot><option number><colors><pattern>
>
> Quite honestly, the biggest chunk of data might be the "fog of war"
> data for the zone maps. Even that can't be very big.
>
> More than a kilobyte, yeah, definitely, I'll give you that. But if it
> reaches or even approaches a megabyte, I'd have to question the skill
> of the programmers.
A meg per char ? Nah, I doubt it. It's probably in the 10-20K range,
though, at least. Then multiply that by the following:
total number of customer accounts * 8 * 10 * 15 (picking the mid-range of
kilobytes)
let's say there are 100,000 accounts:
((100000 * 8) * 10) * 15 =
(800000) * 10) * 15 =
8000000 * 15 =
120,000,000 kilobytes
or 117187.5 megabytes
or 117.19 gigabytes for the US servers alone. That is, of course,
assuming that every single customer has 8 alts on all 10 servers. While
this obviously isn't the case (I, for example, have 7 alts on one server
only), it has to be *planned* to be so. I would guess that total
character data is probably around the 30-50 gigabyte mark, if my numbers
are close-ish, which I think they are.
Equally obviously, it's not like the servers are searching through the
entire data structure to find bits and pieces (gotta love relational
DB's), but over time, it really, really does add up in terms of speed and
performance hits.
I've seen this myself where a customer *insisted* on keeping millions of
lines of ordering data in their order database, even though some of them
were years old (I wanted to, at the very least, duplicate the DB
structure and move everything that wasn't in the current or previous year
to it, but they thought they knew better) Long story short: When they
finally listened to me and let me archive older data that wasn't being
used anymore, the entire application sped up *massively*, (And, of
course, they were 'surprised' at the speed increase).
Storage is always cheap, but performance never is
--
Marc Bissonnette
CGI / Database / Web Management Tools:
http://www.internalysis.com
Looking for a new ISP?
http://www.canadianisp.com