Should an alliance send in a request, even if they're gonna be on a "We'll form if they form" stance?
What's the threshold between superfluous requests for unlikely fights and a useful request even if the fight didn't end up happening (one side stands down or something)?
Yeah, this is indeed difficult to answer. If you know the system, where the fight would be, and you made already preparations for the fight, then it is probably worth to send a request, even if the other side does not show up. But yeah, sending too many requests could again lead to worse performance, if we are running out of dedicated nodes (although in some cases we can avoid this with manual intervention).
Dear CCP. Why oh why can you not utilize virtualization and memory balooning to automatically migrate high-load nodes over to more heavy hardware instantly? Surely we'd be OK with a bit of hang while the VM hosting the instance is migrated. Just send out a server message so everyone knows it's moving the same way as you do when there's a server restart.
I know, it'd probably be hard to implement perfectly and I have no insight into which resources are really drained in big fights (I'm guessing CPU, memory and IOPS), but god damn how nice it'd be to always be in reinforced mode when the party goes through the roof.
If anyone can do it, it'd be you right? Right...?
With our current setup this is not possible due to several reasons (but this does not mean, that it is a bad idea and not worth to investigate further). In our past attempts to use virtualization we ended up with a quite reduced performance, so we are currently not using virtualization to run the game servers of Tranquility. The main benefit of a reinforcement request is also to separate the fight system from other systems on the same node (which share some resources together). This is easy during downtime, but with our current code later only possible by disconnecting all players in this system. Which resources are drained during a big fight: CPU of a single core and maybe memory bandwidth (not so sure about this one).
Also, perimeter is probably already on a reinforced node by default, just like Jita.
Just for the record: Perimeter was NOT on a reinforced node today, it shared a node with 2 other systems. Unfortunately nobody found it worth to send a request.
PLEASE: Send reinforcement requests ~24h earlier, if you expect a huge fight. We in CCP do not know in most cases, when you are planning a big fight. We really need your help for this! Thanks! :)
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