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Engineering Everquest

Posted by Zonk on from the iron-behind-the-giant dept.

The IEEE Spectrum site has an article up discussing the engineering required to keep Norrath running. From the article: "The Death Star is a huge, warm, windowless room containing the rows and rows of servers that run Sony's online games. The whooshing of a massive air-conditioning system is so loud that conversation is almost impossible. A large steel cage surrounds more than 500 servers stacked 32 high in towering racks--and this is just one battalion, albeit the largest, in Sony's 1500-machine army of servers."

1 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. Not just Everquest by MMaestro · · Score: 2, Interesting
    At any given time, Sony is hosting more than 150 000 sword-wielding, laser-shooting, dragon-slaying gamers from all over the world.

    Everquest is merely the highlight of the report, but theres also EQ2, Planetside and SWG all running off these servers. With that in mind, 150,000 users 'at any given time' isn't too impressive when spread out over 1,500 servers. Assuming the number of users is equally divided (37,500 users and 375 servers per game 'at any given time') then theres not much workload really being put on the servers. That comes out to roughly 1 server per 100 players.