- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: Vinkus
Are there also forums this complex? You have to remember that these boards and the 7th Column boards are run off the same system. You also have to remember that the incredibly complex Column is also present. There may be busier sites, but probably none that put as much strain on the servers as this one.
Complex and busy is Amazon, Ebay, etc. This, regardless of the number of boards, can't possibly approach the complexity and traffic of your average eCommerce site. Halo 2 was hyped for years, known to be THE tent pole game for Xbox 2004. The fact that "server strain" is even mentioned here implies Ideal Science, Bungie or whoever is responsible for these forums was simply not prepared for the level of traffic they now receive...despite that it should have been abundantly clear and the system designed to easily accommodate the expected traffic and then some. Buy better servers, temporarily lease more servers, move the 7th Column stuff off this server. If none of that is possible, there's design flaws in the application. A huge surge of traffic post-launch and for several months beyond surely was anticipated and the forums should have been designed to scale to the demand.
However, I haven't experienced any performance issues....and performance issues have nothing to do with the no search function, chunks of topics from page 1 not displaying, etc. None of that is server resource or cache related. Those are bugs and either oversights or poor design decisions. Whether these are due to budget considerations, an inexperienced development staff, poor management...who knows. For whatever reasons, Ideal Science has an unfinished product sitting under the glaring spotlight of one of the biggest games in recent years.
While we're talking about capacity let me mention something related. I was surprised to see Bungie talking about purging game stats...less than a month after launch. Again, I can imagine the huge amount of data involved in their stats-related stuff, but I have a hard time believing it could become an unmanageable amount in just a few weeks. This again suggests either inefficient database design, under-powered servers, or oddly under-estimated sales for the game. It doesn't seem that tables of mostly integers would be that tough to manage even if your talking about millions and millions of records if the tables are indexed properly. It's not a huge deal. After all, I don't need a lifetime history of my game data. But I was sort of surprised to see such an announcement so soon.
The thing is -- the 7th Column IS on a different server. The recent upgrade to the Column was because of the large strain put on the servers back then, and Bungie did prepare for all the additional traffic, making the upgrade only two months ago.
Considering the rest of the site works fine, as do the Column pages, you are correct in saying that the problems lie in the Forums, but the issues are a side effect and not one that any amount of preparation could have compensated for.
In the end, the solution should be found by the service providers, Ideal Science. Bungie have been working closely with Ideal to try and figure out the problem and fix it. However, you can imagine the magnitude of the issue at hand, and that it's not something that's easy to fix, especially when the problem does not lie with the servers.