Most folks familiar with EVE know that it's built on Python, Stackless Python to be specific. Stackless is a micro-threading framework built on top of Python allowing for millions of threads to be live, without a lot of additional cost from just being Python. It is still Python and that means dealing with the Global Interpreter Lock (hereafter known as the damn stinkin' GIL, or just GIL for short).

Team Gridlock continues to work hard against the demons of fleet lag and could-do-better code. At the end of April we activated a couple of optimizations on Tranquility, and now we've had a few weeks of operation, we can see some measurable results. After sharing these results with the CSM during their recent summit visit, we decided to release them to an even wider audience. So, stand by for some more graph-and-pseudo-code porn.

Previously...

In the first part of this blog, I talked about what Destiny is, and showed how a tool called Telemetry is helping us visualise where we should focus our efforts to improve server performance. I ended with a highlight of a particular problem - missile spamming Drakes causing excessive Destiny load.

This time, I'm going to show how I changed the situation for the better.

Listen Up

Hi.  I'm CCP Masterplan, one of the members of Team Gridlock.  Our job in Gridlock is to tackle the issues of degraded performance under excessive load - in particular making EVE's signature massive fleet-fights more fun.

Whilst CCP Veritas has been having lots of fun switching modules on and off, I've been looking at another area of server load:  Things in space.  Specifically, adding and removing them, moving them around, and how we tell your clients all about them.

So I made this neat graph using our CPU utilization per user metric and I thought I'd share:



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