Distributed Workload World Server
 

Forgive me if this has already been discussed, but it seems that the bandwidth/performance issues are going to always be a problem as long as you have one server trying to control the whole world. Why dont you have multiple people run different zones on the same server? Have like 10 or so people each run a few zones for the server and that would greatly improve lag. Granted it would rely on more people to keep your server up 24/7, but i think you could make a logon system for servers so that when a new server joins the world server the world load is redistributed across the network. I personally think it would work out pretty nicely, what do you guys think?


P.S.
I posted this as a reply to another thread but I think it should be its own thread :P

It has been discussed before. It is a great idea. I don't think it's high on the priority list. At present there are many more important issues to tackle. :)

You can, the question is, does anyone want to :P

Well, if you only have 1 database, at a central location, you have to remember when the zones fire up, you download about 10megs of data if you have a decent sized database. To get it working the best, you would need to modify the source to make updates/inserts goto a "central" mysql server, and reads come from a mirrored copy of it that is local for speed. It wouldnt be that hard, just nobody has coded it yet.

I thought mysql comes with mirroring so you can have multiple mysql databases with the same information

MySQL replication leaves consistency to be desired. Most serverops can barely get a SQL process running, let alone configuring replication.

it does come with replication, but 1 way replication. It takes a little bit to replicate, so you want 1 master that has all downstream slaves which you do all writes to.

This would have all servers get all data as fast as possible and have no problems with different data on 1 slave unless it went down and hasn't synced back up yet.

If I had the meens and the know how I would deffanly be all for doing the muti server in 1 world type thing (ie how sony does it) that way more people on the same game = total cool in my book

With the recent addition of controlling # of peeps per zone this would be even better. Before that if box X's bandwith was maxxed peeps would log into world Y and get handed off to box X that had no bandwith and would just drop.

verry nice addition imho.

I have a friend than can host a MySQL server (and only that) connected to an European Backbone. If any one wanna work with me on a Distributed Workload World Server, just let me know :)

I would like that very much. The sql server is a lot of what we need anyways if he can host that and if the ping times are good then Im all for it. I could use my computer for the world server or could use my server just for the zones, doesnt matter to me but I think the experience would be a lot greater if we setup 1 large server than many small ones. Let me know if you want to persue this. Also I think it would be cool it the zones were scalable in the case that we set this up and have 15-20 ppl in the same zone. We would be able to have more than 1 server hosting the same zone :P just a thought

There server is in France, but the BW is about 155 Mbits/s . Should be ok. Once all is set up, i'll contact him to put all this online.

Ok cool sounds good :)
What does everyone else think about the possibility of going to 1 large server instead of many small ones (keeping in mind that it is only optional to join the larger server) :P

I'm ok if its a semi legit :
no cheats
but different rules/stat etc :p
since he can hosts a server, could have several entrees :p
we can do 2 projects *cough*

Speaking of different rules, I was curious, would it be possible to make it so that you could choose ANY race/class combo? (without the #race command anyways)