[2021] Node Death - 2021/04/27

A node death occurred in the Forge market at 11:32. This node failure is currently impacting the cluster with multiple other systems now experiencing issues. Players may get disconnected if they are on affected nodes.

We are currently working on restoring all nodes to proper functionality. We will update with more details as they become available. Thank you for your patience.

Update 12:29: Systems have been restored and should now be working properly. There are some lingering issues with portal app functionality which we are working on resolving.

It does sound dramatic!

A node is basically a server in the cluster (the network of servers) that make up the game. Each node runs various processes for the game to work - markets, character info, solar system simulations (the main flying around and doing stuff part of the game), etc.

When a node dies it takes with it all of the services which were assigned to it (these may vary day to day for most nodes as the system auto-allocates based on how much resources they’ve needed recently).

Here you can see the basic layout of the EVE cluster which makes up the game. The nodes in this image are the SOL and Proxy servers:

In this case, this was a SOL node death. A proxy node death just results in all players who were connected via that proxy getting disconnected.

A ‘reinforced’ node is a node like any other - the difference is that instead of letting the load balancer auto assign a system to a node as would normally happen, we manually assign the system simulation to its own node, so it’s not competing with any other processes on the server and has access to all of the available resources. We have a few decently powerful machines we can swap in for such purposes, but it’s not a big difference in computing power from our standard nodes.