dirkx - Slashdot User

An Inside Look At Warhammer Online's Server Setup 71

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday December 31, 2009 @02:30AM from the hate-to-see-the-power-bill dept.

An article at Gamasutra provides some details on the hardware Mythic uses to power Warhammer Online, courtesy of Chief Technical Officer Matt Shaw and Online Technical Director Andrew Mann. Quoting: "At any given time, approximately 2,000 servers are in operation, supporting the gameplay in WAR. Matt Shaw commented, 'What we call a server to the user, that main server is actually a cluster of a number of machines. Our Server Farm in Virginia, for example,' Mann said, 'has about 60 Dell Blade chassis running Warhammer Online — each hosting up to 16 servers. All in all, we have about 700 servers in operation at this location.' ... 'We use blade architecture heavily for Warhammer Online,' Mann noted. 'Almost every server that we deploy is a blade system. We don't use virtualization; our software is somewhat virtualized itself. We've always had the technology to run our game world across several pieces of hardware. It's application-layer clustering at a process level. Virtualization wouldn't gain us much because we already run very close to peak CPU usage on these systems.' ... The normalized server configuration — in use across all of the Mythic-managed facilities — features dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 3 GHz with 8 GB of RAM."

Comment sharp/in-line support (Score 1) 178

by dirkx on Monday April 14, 2008 @01:16PM (#23066068) Attached to: Can You Access Your Own Cash Register Data?

Most modern (even the low end) registers allow for saving the transactions to a memory card, or can be polled (or can act as a 'stupid termina' when wired up -- but that requires a lot more software). The low end units typically store the output as ascii; very akin to the format you find on the paper tape; i.e. as would be written to the printer (at the end of the day, or as a carbon copy). Some, e.g. Sharp, have a more readily parsed format, basically CSV, which is easier to handle - or can even do html!. Keywords to search for (with the latter vendor) are SDW; or in general 'in-line' support. At the very extreme end - consider a POS application (or perhaps even http://www.checkoutapp.com/) with just a cash-drawer, a printer and no till at all. These are generally 'unlocked' easily and a lot of have a simple printerport connection to which you can send an 'esc' 'O' command -- akin to the old EPSON FX-80 era world. Dw.

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