The European Servers are back online - Thursday, 11th November 2010

This has to be a first

I'm another who's hopeful that it's the beginning of a server list merge.

The lion is happy

(note: all distances in this post are approximate straight-line ones, estimated with the Ruler tool in Google Earth. Network distances are almost invariably *longer*, sometimes significantly so depending on backbone routing; also, the speed of light in long-haul fiber is about 1.5 slower than the vacuum speed, even before accounting for any switching, amplifier, etc. delays.)

This is certainly not entirely true, and possibly not really close. As a player in Virginia near the high-bandwidth state fiber backbone, the performance to the former East coast servers also in Virginia was dramatically better than to the former West coast servers, and significantly better than to the current unified Texas datacenter. My SG has a concentration of players in DC, VA, and NC, and mostly played on Triumph and Victory (both East) for a reason; when we'd go onto Training Room, Protector, or other West coast servers the performance would be significantly and noticeably worse.

Since the US server farm has moved to Dallas, Texas this summer, network performance has been on average worse; I run with /netgraph 1 a fair amount of the time these days, and get considerably more tall green and red spikes than I did last year.

Does anyone know where in Virginia the East-coast datacenter actually used to be? Assuming it was in the DC / Northern Virginia area, from my place that's meant a change in my case from less than 200 miles over high-quality connections, to about 950 miles, with several more hops; and that's a noticeable drop in quality. If the West-coast datacenter was in San Francisco (confirmation? I'm going based on ZM's post), the distance to there was almost 2,300 miles, and pretty much everyone I knew could tell the difference between performance at ~200 and ~2,300. German players are going to be adding something on the order of 5,000 miles... saying that's not an issue is highly suspect.

Quick calc shows that European players will likely be adding an utter minimum one-way delay on the order of 40 ms (speed of light in long-haul fiber is about 4.9 us per km (yes, that's significantly slower than in vacuum), or roughly 0.008 ms per mile). Doing some better legwork, according to AT&T the current actual transatlantic latency is 77 ms for New York - London, and 87 for Washington DC - Frankfurt; add to that the continental delay of 44 for the New York - Dallas connection. For comparison, the Washington, DC - San Fransisco link is showing a delay of 72, which matches ping times in the mid-80 range to well-connected servers there that I'm currently seeing.

Unless they happen to be the same hardware that could also be used to later provide additional clustered capacity to the existing US servers...

Anyway, this is all the more amusing to me because it's the final nail in the coffin that contains every bogus argument NCSoft made all those years ago for why they needed to have separate servers with separate staff for the EU. We called them on it then, and they said we didn't know what we were talking about. If only I could go back in time and show them this post, we could have all saved ourselves a lot of damned hassle.

I can play some Muse - Uprising if it'll make you feel better?

Oy vey, quit your kvetching dongle boy!

this

Yup, my thoughts as well.

Besides, nobody that needs to maintain servers would agree to not only move the existing environment to a new server cluster, but meanwhile perform a major change to how data is handled. It's asking for trouble to hit you on the head.

Normal steps would be to move to new hardware as-is. Test. Make sure EVERYTHING is in working order.
Once satisfied, that's the moment to start thinking about changing how the data is handled in regards to merging data from both environments. After all, boards, market, store and whatnot are not on the same servers as 'we' are. They have nawt to do with unification other than us EU peeps being able to ask ungodly amounts of inf for crap salvage

Anyway, I'm happy with this, now it's just a wait to find out when the next steps will be taken. And I'd happily greet more people on the (then former) EU servers

Also go's for me. Server merge for Christmas would be the icing on the preverbial cake however

The WW is a server of it's own I believe, probably mounted in the US already so I doubt it. Although maybe with our servers there too it will help the connection between them. I have no idea how that works.

There is still a lot of things to be done...

We have currently two account servers... NA and EU... These should be merged. Meaning that for some problems can arise if they have an NA account and an EU account. As it is now those names are both the same. And will probably get a prefix. Now which account do you want to keep? And which veteran rewards? Or do you want to keep both? The last one will probably be what NCSOFT wants to establish. If you have two accounts that you can use to duo-box you might consider keeping them both on. Ofcourse this system will loose them some subs that are double!

This effects your global and the global system. The EU will probably get EU as prefix added and a free global name change. Almost the same as with the forum name merge.

* As a result nothing stops us from merging the site and the last part of the forum. We currently have an EU and NA login for the forums. That would be gone. The ip redirector will be important here. So EU ends up on the EU store to pay for the game in EUR, while NA will be directed to the dollar page.

This gives us advertisements that can be the same all over the world. The ip redirector system will still make sure EU and NA end up on the right order page.

* All codes and add-ons will be working on the same servers.

* One big community, one server list, one global system.

Would you like some cheese with your whine?

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

lol

I doubt that's even on the cards.

There's a lot going on right up to xmas... so I'd imagine if there was anything even planned - which we have know knowledge of and are purely speculating about - it wouldn't be until 2011 earliest.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Saying that , did we see see the servers being moved as quick as they did or did i miss some news to that effect? , knowing how slow i am at the best of times it's probably been in the public knowledge for weeks

Nope, warned about it yesterday. I'd imagine a server list merge would require more notice to nut out what happens with globals etc. Although I've only seen one person say they wouldn't want to change their global. I have no attachment to mine except thats what people know my by. I'd change in a hearbeat for a merge, as would most EU players I'd bet.

They can take my global when they pry it from my cold, motionless digits...

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.