{"id":2518,"date":"2013-06-22T16:50:43","date_gmt":"2013-06-22T15:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=2518"},"modified":"2013-06-22T16:54:22","modified_gmt":"2013-06-22T15:54:22","slug":"mmo-scalability-is-finally-irrelevant-for-indie-mmos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2013\/06\/22\/mmo-scalability-is-finally-irrelevant-for-indie-mmos\/","title":{"rendered":"MMO scalability is finally irrelevant for Indie MMOs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a great post-mortem on Growtopia (launched 2012, developed by a team of two)<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s slightly buried in there, but I spotted this:
\n<\/p>\n

\n“I had guessed conservatively, 600 players online would be our max.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(a sensible estimate, in 2000-2005, for an unoptimized, badly-written server where you threw it together quickly because it was more important to get your game launched than waste time on “beautiful code”)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\nIn mid April we hit 2,000 concurrent users … our server began to buckle. Round trip to punch something could take a full second and people were constantly being disconnected.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Both “1 second RTT” and “people being disconnected a lot” are classic signs of a server that is FUBAR and needs some emergency work to fix the scaling problems)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n“I would write a “V2 server” … that would [use] multiple cores; it made no sense that our hardware had 16 cores and 32 threads but our entire Growtopia server process was run in a single thread.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wait, … what? You’re single-threaded?<\/h3>\n

Everything I wrote above (about “normal” conservative estimates etc) was valid assuming you used multi-threaded code, that was badly written, that had poor synchronization design (it locked often because you’d been too lazy to think about your code carefully), etc.<\/p>\n

Growtopia isn’t unique – but I believe it’s symptomatic of what’s happened more widely. Off-the-shelf tech has reached the point that Scalability is finally irrelevant<\/em> for Indie MMOs. Just write your code (badly) as multi-threaded, and you’ll be fine. (by “off the shelf” I mean: standard libraries + standard VM’s + standard hardware + standard OS’s)<\/p>\n

\nYour assumption today – when you hack together version 0.1, quickly – should be “this should be OK for 5,000 concurrent users (pessimistically)”.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Things have changed…<\/h3>\n

5k concurrent is somewhere between 100k and 200k actual users. If you’ve got 100k users and you’re not making a considerable chunk of money … you’re doing something very wrong with your business model :). By the time your scalability becomes an issue, you’ll have the cash to pay someone (maybe yourself) to write “version 1.0” of your server code.<\/p>\n

To be clear: Not “something amazing, highly optimized, super-slick and efficient”, but rather: “doesn’t suck”.<\/p>\n

When I started in online games \/ MMOs, scalability was a “mega-critical” issue. I did a lot of work on theory and application of server optimization (from the architecture design, through the choices of programming languages, to the usage of low-level calls on specific OS’s) – I even got a patent for my work, and wrote a chapter for the Game Programming Gems series.<\/p>\n

Today, there’s still a lot of FUD around scalability – and it’s made worse IMHO by the branding\/commercialization of scalability (cloud computing, noSQL etc are really marketing ideas from startups and corporates, *not* tech ideas). People are *afraid* of scaling.<\/p>\n

For a while, that was a good thing: there are many “failed” MMOs from the 2000’s (names omitted to protect the innocent) that were hurried along to their deaths by terrible, non-scalable, tech.<\/p>\n

But the world has moved on. Server speed tends to advance slower than client speed (compare servers to graphics cards…) – but we’re at the point now where your servers are so fast already that IT DOESN’T MATTER. Yay!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a great post-mortem on Growtopia (launched 2012, developed by a team of two) It’s slightly buried in there, but I spotted this:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,9,33,34,15,20,17,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2518"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2518"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2520,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2518\/revisions\/2520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}