Sales figures (Japan) for ARRFollow

If you're really interested in network architecture, look up virtualization and load balancing.

I'm the lead architect for a very large ecommerce site, and the principle is the same as a game server. You have an endpoint ( we'll call it a world) which is a load balancer, and behind that you have 1-n number of servers. Your end point splits the processing load upon all the servers as evenly as possible. These aren't high end PC's, it's an entirely different world. As far as hard drives go, they probably aren't even attached to the servers directly, it'll be in something called a storage area network (SAN). Given the throughput that's the only way they could handle pushing that much data back to the storage medium that fast.

So what Yoshi is really doing (and I don't mean that in a disrespectful way to you) is dumbing it down so that non technical people can try to relate. In reality it's a very different setup than what most people are picturing. If you're interested in an example, look up blade servers. They run on the low end $3K each, and you fit 8 in a row, 6 rows in a rack. SE probably filled 20 extra racks with their servers to keep up with demand.

-j

Well, each server cluster itself will have a maximum number of connections it can juggle around, too. I'm sure it's hooked up to the Duty Finder servers via fiber channel connections (super duper high grade connections, a thousand times better than what is used to connect your home PC to the router) but it still has to deal with incoming packets from the outside world. For that, it'll have a connection to a network switch too.

So there's still a theoretical maximum number of character transactions each server can handle before it starts getting packet collisions from all the data flowing in and out of each server.