On Thu, 4 Nov 1999, Daniel P. Sniderman wrote:
>
> > When were corpse decay times changed? I thought only the time
> > you had to get an experience res was changed? AFAIK, they
> > still last 8 hours online or 7 days offline.
>
> There was a change a while ago - I forget the nitty gritty. It was was for
> multiple corpses of the same character. They disappear much quicker.
> Perhaps only if they have no items on it. I'm not sure if it was on the
The only corpse decay time changes I recall were a general
overhaul so newbie corpses do not last as long, and empty
corpses do not last as long.
> patch message - or an excerpt of a usenet post from Brad. I recall reading
> this off of EQVault. It was explicitly stated from Verant directly that
> they are having problems with too many items on the servers and have to take
> steps to reduce it.
You don't happen to follow UO, do you? Origin announced
exactly what you describe about a month ago. They just
finished up an item destruction program, where you got
"tickets" for every item you destroyed. You could then turn
in X number of tickets for a prize.
> > worn items, and that's it. Assuming you have all your
> > inventory full of 10 slot backpacks and chock full of items,
> > that's 160 items per character. Call it 180 to account for
> > worn items. Assume all 8 character slots are used in this
> > manner. That's 1440 items per player. Assume 5000 players
> > per server all doing this, and that's 7.2 million items as a
> > close-to-worst-case scenario. If each item has 1k of data
> > associated with it, that's roughly 7 GB. My PC's hard drive
> > is bigger than that.
>
> Only 5000 per server? That seems WAY low to me. The active servers average
> just under 2000 players simultaneos in peak times. Verant says they have
> 250,000 subscribers. How many servers are there - 12? If evenly
26.
> distributed that would be 20,000 per server. But we know the users aren't
> evenly distributed. And how many CHARACTERS on averager. This database
I assumed all 8 characters are used.
> discussion is based on characters not players. How many characters does the
> average player have. How many people buy the game and have quit. How long
> do they stay before being purged. So my estimate is (worse-case server)
>
> 30,000 player accounts - and average of 4 characters - 120,000 characters -
> So by my estimate we're adding 164 GB not 7.
This is not data we're adding. This was a back of the
envelope calculation for the maximum size of the entire item
database.
Given 260,000 players (which assumes nobody has quit), the
average per server would be 10,000. Say you have twice that
for Fennin Ro - 20,000 players. 20,000 players * 8 chars *
180 items * 1k per item = 27.5 GB for the entire database.
Now using the same assumptions, say we're going to add a
4 byte timestamp to each item (could probably get away with a
2 byte timestamp, but let's be fecetious). That will increase
your database size by 107 MB, or 0.39%. I suppose the hard
part would be recompiling the database to accomidate the extra
4 bytes.
> Now even if is 7GB and not 164GB - comparing to your PC's hard disk to a
> Database you're comparing apples to oranges. My experience is with
> commercial DBMS that support transactions and two-phase commits. Verant I'm
> sure uses a properietary scheme that's tuned for speed But regardless A 7
> GB increase can be a HUGE problem. We are expecting a seemless world where
> everything seems to happen in real-time. I've worked with 7 GB databases
> (and we're talking about a 7 GB increase to a much larger databases here)
Again, we're not talking about an increase. We're talking
about the entire database being 7 GB.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...