Reign Of Blood News Blog

For all major news announcements for the online vampire game, Reign Of Blood.

Optimisation Progress & Server Upgrades

Posted on 10-Mar-2019

Last month I announced my major optimisation project which entails upgrading, enhancing and modernising Reign Of Blood code's base as we move forward. Today, I'm taking on beta-testers and giving more details on the timeline of this project.

Phase 1
Open up test server subdomain with up to date software and latest versions of PHP & MySQL running Reign Of Blood to fix all compatibility errors. I have spent the last couple weeks doing exactly this, as well as tidying up and streamling the front-end code. I'm ready to take on beta-testers to help find the errors I've not found, more details on that shortly.

Phase 2
Optimise and clean up the entire database. Getting rid of tables and variables no longer used, making sure things are being deleted when they should and remove all bloat. Going to move around the variable table locations a little to help speed up the variables updated on the hourly reset, too.

Phase 3
Some people have been mentioning some lag on the hourly reset, and although when these optimisations are complete, things will get better. (As well as the current ongoing investigations.) I think it's time we looked at our current hardware and see if any improvements can be made. So, I've been speaking to sparkles about some server upgrades.

The server has sufficient CPU and RAM, but to many people's surprise -- the bottleneck of the hourly reset is neither of those -- it's disk read/write speeds. Although back in 2015 we upgraded to SSD, SSD's have come a long way since then. The proposed new components for the server are as follows:

2x Intel Xeon E5-2667 v3 (2014) (8-core 3.2GHz) processors to be replaced with 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6134 (2018) (8-core 3.2GHz) processors

Even though the base clock speeds are the same, it has higher turbo boost speeds up to 3.70 GHz if and when we need it, more cache, and Intel's latest technologies.

2x 200GB Intel DC S3700 SSD to be replaced with 2x Intel DC P4460 1.6TB NVMe SSD .

These new Intel NVMe SSD's are very impressive, with up to 2080mb/s write speeds. An overview of the difference between the current and the potential new one:

6.4x sequential read MB/sec
5.7x sequential write MB/sec
8.6x random read IOPS
6.2x random write IOPS
3.6x write latency

I'm excited to see the extra speed we'll get with these upgrades. As I said, our bottleneck is disk write speeds, so seeing a 5.7x speed increase will surely help the hourly reset.

Phase 4
The final phase will be getting the new server upgrades complete, the latest software installed, and Reign Of Blood put onto it.

Although the increase cost for these upgrades is well within my budget, the upfront cost is quite high, so I'll be running a special pack to help pay for the extra upfront cost for these new hardware parts very soon. (It's unbelievable how much companies like Intel charge for "server grade" hardware! But it's a lower volume business, I guess. Also, the 2 x 1.6tb drives are complete overkill for our needs, but Intel don't sell their super fast SSDs in any smaller storage capacities.)

Beta Testers
You might be asking yourself how you apply to try out the beta server, and hoping if you're be lucky enough to get picked. Thankfully, we're not going down that road. Everyone and anyone is welcome to beta test the new server. I have setup a dedicated thread to give more details and information how to join. Please click here.

Enjoy,
Ash

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