A big weekend for EVE Online

Last Saturday at 17:39:08 the one-hundred-thousandth subscriber signed up for EVE Online. Yes, our little game is not so small any more now that the 100.000 subscriber mark has been surpassed.

On Sunday we had 23.178 players logged on at the same time.

These two milestones further underline the fact that EVE has outgrown its current hardware architecture. As I reported last year and Oveur further explained last month we have ordered a complete replacement of our Sol and Proxy Server layers.

The new 64 bit blades have now been delivered, assembled, firmware upgraded, tuned, tweaked and verified. At 11:00 yesterday morning (6 Feb), the shipment was picked up and is now en route to London and scheduled to be released from customs at the end of this week. To put things into perspective: the shipment is over half a ton.

Then follows a week of installation and even more testing. The new cluster will probably be run as Singularity (our test cluster) to verify all interconnects and sanity check all aspects of this major upgrade.

Then we are hoping to be able to switch over to the new cluster by the end of February. This would mean tripling the amount of horsepower that operates the SOL Server and Proxy Server layers of EVE Online.

We are not stopping there, next up on the agenda are even more upgrades for the SQL Server layer, possibly another Ramsan but a new database cluster for sure.

So we remain committed in following where you, the EVE community, are taking us, albeit sometimes being slowed down by logistics realities.

Thank you for the patience you have shown us.