A Look At One of Blizzard's Retired World of Warcraft Servers

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 19, 2012 @07:33AM from the dissecting-a-nerd-playground dept.

MojoKid writes "At last count, Activision Blizzard pegged the number of World of Warcraft subscribers at 10.2 million. It takes a massive amount of gear to host all the different game worlds, or realms, as they're referred to. Each realm is hosted on its own server, and in late 2011, Activision Blizzard began auctioning off retired server blades from the days of yore to benefit the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. They sold around 2,000 retired Hewlett-Packard p-Class server blades on eBay and donated 100 percent of the proceeds (minus auction expenses) to the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which seeks to advance the treatment and prevention of catastrophic diseases in children. This article has a look at one of those retired server blades."

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Re:Ya well having played WoW by Anonymous Coward · 2012-03-19 10:32 · Score: 4, Interesting

Speaking AC here for obvious reasons.
The reasons Blizzard did this was simply to delete objects. That is pretty much it as the I/O was the bottleneck when you had 20k - 40k population on each server and every SQL check becomes precious. You cached commonly used things and by the time a week is used the ram is filled up.
Wow and SWTOR still do this for a scraping of objects every week.
Occasionally new code is released too. That is quick to update over the network when the realm is down when it is done cleaning its objects.