Over the last few days I've basically been firing up some more cloud servers in order to spread the work load that is done by Rush Rally 3. Basically I'm paying for some pretty powerful computers at the moment in order to run the Live Events and the database, which is eating into the very small profit margin. Because of the amount of stuff running on this server it is set to be a 16CPU dedicated high performance machine. Without this speed the database can grind to a halt and then appear offline.
So What I've done is split the different sections of the database onto different servers. So now I have 3 servers:
- Generic: statistics (who has installed the game, who has "stolen/pirated" the game (yes I know all about you), what platform, what device etc etc).
- Live Events: this is purely dedicated to the live events system
- Leaderboards: This is dedicated to times and ghost data.
I've created a load more DNS names for these, all of which currently point to the original machine, then once the update is out I can migrate the servers without people knowing and slash the cost of the dedicated machine for a shared CPU machine.
Basically splitting one powerful server up into a set of smaller servers helps distribute the load and keeps the cost about 20x lower :)
The idea now being that I can spin up a server purely for sharing liveries or multiplayer etc etc. Livery sharing is a popular request, and it would save me having to post pictures of other peoples creations all the time!
And it would be rude not to show yet more user created content. The screenshots below were liveries created in game by twitter user Angelino Carranza https://twitter.com/BlackGT_1 .
