LDs and such now that peak hours have lots of users

[BennoFlo]

I know live servers only supported a limited amount of users in EQ's classic days.

I've been in a few groups, and I seem to be seeing a lot of LD's during peak hours now that the numbers are getting close to 1100 among my groupmates and myself.

Question for Rogean -
Do we know how well we can scale? Is there a hard limit for number of users? What measures have been taken for this if any?

I'm not complaining, just wondering on the numbers.

[Wrathis]

I think that was the whole reason he moved to a new data center. I think it is expected when Velious is released to add another few hundred if not a thousand new players to our peak hours.

[BennoFlo]

Oh Sorry, I must've been in hiatus when that occurred.

Cool. Hopefully the LD issues and things won't keep reoccurring then.

[Derubael]

The lag you experience in those situations is (likely) a DDoS attack, a targeted attack against our servers with the intent to lag the server by clogging the pipes. We've had a large number of those attacks, particularly during peak play times, and they can cause people to disconnect, or not be able to use commands or spells in game.

Server pipeline is big enough to support far, far more than what we have now. 1100 shouldn't even be making it sweat.

[Rararboker]

I don't understand why people want to DDoS P99.

[tristantio]

They should just run the servers with a blacklist on all, and a whitelist for allowed IPs (to connect to the server).

I would think the DDOS would have to be insanely massive if all it was able to send through was a failed connection to the firewall.

[Andervin]

I don't understand why people want to DDoS P99.

I can imagine there's a small army of banned x-players that are behind this.

[Spitty]

That's a solution of last resort.

You have to devote a lot of time to whitelist maintenance and adhere to an acceptable SLA, or alienate everyone on dynamic or those who play from hotels, cafes, etc.

I'll take the occasional pingout over logging on, finding out my IP has switched, submitting an IP update request, waiting for a response, trying again, finding out my IP has switched yet again, submitting another request, etc.