i was thinking about this standing at the bus today. how to do load balancing for multiple ps servers. admittedly it would be nice for ps to have this problem, but, it does seem like an interesting excerise for the moment.
for simplification i was using the following:
-all the servers are on the same physical network, ie plugged into the same switch.
-there is no instancing of servers. everybody is on the same "server" rather than the first available one.
-there is a master db server that holds the primary copy of the data.
the first idea was that the server could be split. except to keep everybody on the same server there would be no benefit, and the number of messages being passed around would be nuts. so that idea was junked.
however, things are broken down into maps. which brings up the second idea. it would be possible to dedicate a server to each map. when a player moves from map to map there is a hand off message from server to server. so a light server message load, and obvious partitioning of the load. though for heavily used maps loading may be a problem again, and we are left with the base case.
npcs are obvious and left as an exercise for the reader.
i think this may have been discussed somewhere before.
now how out of left field am i talking, or can i see the bleachers with a telescope?
