Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Offers Look Inside WoW At GDC
Yesterday morning at GDC Austin, Blizzard's J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce took to the stage to finally give a peek inside the inner workings of World of Warcraft. Tipping the scales at around 4,600 people utilizing 20,000 computer systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage, Blizzard has created a raging behemoth. The Online Network services group alone has "data centers from Texas to Seoul, and monitor over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. [Pearce] points out the picture of the GNOC (Global Network Operations Center) in their slideshow, a data core that even has televisions tuned to the weather stations. They use those to ensure that conditions of the data center are up to their standards; with only a staff of 68 people they ensure connectivity across the globe for the numerous WoW servers."
I think he may mean that in countries like Russia and China the subscription rate is tremendously lower due to the local currency.
I was told by someone at blizzard that they essentially implemented a fix across all battlegroups (which for those who don't know is a collection of realms at one data center) so you shouldn't see the error anymore. The problem was that each realm had a set amount of blades (something like 14?) for instances. Lower population realms didn't use hardly any of that capacity - whereas high population realms there wasn't enough. Well any good server admin knows you never can tell if a low population realm becomes a high population realm or visa versa so clearly you can't build these realms based off that alone - the app needs to scale accordingly.
The fix was that now all instances belong to a pool of servers now - which will eventually allow instance sharing across realms (that is - a party of players on different realms) once its switched on.