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While we're on the topic of scalability, what did you learn (if anything) from the Guild Wars 2 beta signup incident? For those of you who are unaware, which is
by endianswap 15y ago
While we're on the topic of scalability, what did you learn (if anything) from the Guild Wars 2 beta signup incident? For those of you who are unaware, which is probably nearly all of you, ArenaNet opened up registration for the beta of Guild Wars 2, and internally we were using Ducksboard to track the signups in realtime, but when we got close to 1 million registrations we decided to make a public Ducksboard page, which apparently took down some servers until the Ducksboard people were able to presumably scale things up.
- wulczer 15y agoWe (hope we) did learn. First of all, pay closer attention to the usage patterns. We saw increased activity for a few days before the beta signup, but never investigated in depth. We only learned that something's up when the heavy traffic started and monitoring alarms went off. Second, get the scaling-up procedure more automated, we had everything planned, but it took too much time to get the extra infrastructure ready. Pressure and precise operation don't work well together. Third, we uncovered a previously unknown memory leak in one of the components, which got evident during the Guild Wars 2 event and forced us to restart a subsystem a few times. All in all it was a nice (if a bit stressful) experience, hope you guys enjoyed it a bit yourselves too :)
- endianswap 15y agoThanks for the details. I'm not going to say it was awesome, but it was pretty cool to see our fans accidentally DDOS a service just by sheer excitement. I mostly felt bad after I looked up Ducksboard and saw that you guys are a pretty small operation; that made me feel a little bad. ;)