Pushing Performance To Its Limits and Beyond

Over the course of the past month, when it comes to performance upgrades, we've really pushed hard against several walls, smashed through them and began our invasion of the other side. The team has been blogging as they go in order to record what truly is a set of monumental achievements for EVE Online.

On September 16th, we deployed StacklessIO, a technology two years in the making, that raised the ceiling on the amount of players that could be in a system to almost double what it was before. What we experienced was "an astounding, yet expected, measurable difference" in performance that only created a more stable experience for the hundreds that regularly visit the high traffic areas of New Eden, but it showed us a new hurdle - at 1,400 players in a system, we actually began to run out of resources to handle it. To combat that we would have to upgrade from the current 32-bit software the servers were running.

Enter EVE64. With Stackless IO in place, we were finally in a position to start migrating our servers to 64-bit software. The team went to work and the move to 64-bits was started, completed, and successfully deployed inside of one week. What this means for EVE is more processing power and almost quadruple the memory to work with. What it means for our subscribers is smoother battles, more stable high concurrency areas and an even better gaming experience.

While the opening sentence might seem a bit of an exaggeration at first, we invite you to read through the following DevBlogs, full of details and graphs, showing the amazing strides forward we've made in reducing latency and improving on the already massive scale that EVE Online operates.

* StacklessIO - deploying cutting edge technology
* EVE64 - improving performance and opening up greater possibilities
* My node was equipped with the following... - where we are headed from here