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I'm very curious what it is in Diablo that's causing the issues. It seems a bit odd to me that they're experiencing issues this severe for two reasons: 1) Diab
by burke 14y ago
I'm very curious what it is in Diablo that's causing the issues. It seems a bit odd to me that they're experiencing issues this severe for two reasons:
1) Diablo was developed from the fairly unusual position of knowing it would face a launch to millions of users before development ever started. I'd have imagined having this "scale it to infinity" mentality from the starting line would have helped a lot.
2) The whole game is conceptually VERY easy to shard. Unlike WoW, there is very little interaction between players that are not in a party together, and the maximum party size is four.
I wonder whether the failures have anything to do with the achivement tracking/broadcasting. It's the only component I can think of that breaks out of these obvious sharding boundaries, and I can kind of imagine how large friend lists might cause problems. Additionally, it seems achievement progress was lost from the time leading up to one of the downtimes.
I know it's easy to speculate from here, and there are probably very legitimate reasons for all of this. As an outsider, it seems like these particular failures are things that, in general, just happen. Still, I would have expected Blizzard in particular to be better prepared for this. It's a bit surprising.
- barkerja 14y agoNo idea if this stands true, but did just see this on Reddit: http://i.imgur.com/efw0N.png http://i.imgur.com/efw0N.png
- burke 14y agoI saw that too. I tend to mistrust anything originating on 4chan, but it would explain the authentication server blowing up. I'm looking forward to reading (hoping they release) a post-mortem on this.
- ckwang 14y agoIt's odd to me too. They had a great deal of pre-order information, something that most other server teams that face crazy launches don't ever have. I would guess that they could at least estimate the load to an order of magnitude. The fact that single player can't even be accessed is absurd, something that your comment on sharding hits on. The server teams at Blizzard should also have had some experience with this in their WoW trials and errors.
- busted 14y agoAll it takes is one cluster falling over due to one unexpected issue stemming from unprecedented, more-or-less unreproducible simultaneous load to take a service down, especially if it removes the ability to log in. Distributed services under very heavy load are susceptible to all the same small bugs due to all the normal mistakes every developer makes, except it's much easier for those bugs to cause catastrophic failures!