Alby_da_Wolf said:
Indeed. The interview explains it's not a problem of server infrastructure, but of the game SW itself. It's not very specific beyond that, though, I'm curious about what kind of error it could be. That exec made it clear it's not a trivial one, so maybe they botched the whole design of the communication scheme between clients and servers, so flooding the latter, when the number of players increase, with too many data, maybe also fragmented in too many small packets. |
Yeah, it must be a fundamental design flaw. They way things load it seems to explode in communication requests. When a leaderboard or face off loads you get everything in little bits. First the times and score, then the name, then the club name and icons, all appearing seperately for every line in the leaderboard, instead of 1 request returning everything in one chunk. Plus every race you start requests leader boards, score to beat for your car, ghost data and multiple face-offs, which reset everytime you restart. With instant restarts, 15 sec loading times, and events that range from 4 minutes to only 15 seconds, that's a lot of requests. Ironically if everyone would be playing online multiplayer races it would lighten the server load a lot.
It reminds of a project we did a long time ago. A new hire was set on making a data processing engine to handle large databases. He did it according to text book c++ design using the mfc library. Worked perfectly on test databases, very neat readable and modular code as well. When it was time to put the real database to the test performance botched down to estimated completetion times of weeks instead of hours, no matter what server rack was running the code. It took a big low level c rewrite of all the cricitcal parts to speed it up 100 to 1000 fold.
And now they're in the woods with a huge unresponsive database with all the times and ghost data since launch. I'm glad I'm not working there :)
