Recent Surge In Players + New Machine And EU Expansion Update

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hey everyone and happy New Years!

 

This year represents GFL's 10 year anniversary (January 25th, 2011 is when it was founded) and we're already off to a great start!

 

I just wanted to provide a small update to everybody regarding two topics.

 

Recent Surge Of Players + New Machine

Since New Years, we've seen a big surge in players on GFL's servers. In fact, today, we beat our all-time record of players online on all of GFL's servers at the same time (thank you to everybody who made this possible!).

 

 

Our all-time record was 1299 players on at the same time back in mid-2015 and this included a TeamSpeak 3 server at 100+ users! More accomplishments can be found here for those interested!

 

We've seen a 200 - 300+ peak player increase just in the past two days (mostly from our Rust servers). With this happening, we've noticed our machines becoming overloaded. While our servers run with great hardware (which are detailed here), we're starting to run into performance issues due to the amount of CPU all of the game servers are consuming in combination.

 

@Aurora asked if we could purchase another US machine and I agreed. Therefore, I am going to be talking to GSK and requesting a new US machine (located in Dallas, TX like the rest of our US machines).

 

I believe I'm going to request another machine with the Intel i9-10900K processor just like our GS15 and GS16 machines unless if the newer AMD series is available with GSK which have better single-threaded performance according to the benchmarks I've seen (single-threaded performance matters the most for game servers since most are mostly single-threaded).

 

Once I have an update on this, I will let you know.

 

I just wanted to also apologize for the poor performance on the affected servers. I was, at least, not expecting this big of a player surge so suddenly, but regardless, I'm going to try getting this new machine ASAP so we can mitigate the issues. In the meantime, we may try load-balancing servers between machines to help with performance/load.

 

Small Update On Europe Expansion

We're going to be expanding into Europe and the plan can be found here! 

 

This process has taken longer than I was expecting and I apologize for the delay. Towards the bright side, IP2Location has set our EU IP's block geo-location (185.240.217.0/24) to London, UK which was a huge step in this process (so the Valve Master Server will show the EU servers quicker for EU players and whatnot due to it using geo-location). All we're waiting for now is the EU POP to be setup with GSK. The EU machine itself is setup and has been ready for some time. However, we're unable to send traffic out as our EU IP block (185.240.217.0/24) and this is because the GSK network blocks these packets due to them not being a part of the RPF policies. We must announce the EU IP block on the GSK POP in order to resolve this issue. I am waiting for GSK to correct the BGP session issue we're running into at the moment and GSK said it shouldn't take much longer.

 

I'm hoping we can get this going this weekend or next week at some point!

 

If you have any questions about the above, feel free to reply!

 

Thank you!

[calebevb 106 / 3,072]

Now this is a poggers moment. I also think the reason for our rust servers population going up is mainly because of all the big streamers on twitch like Shroud Xqc and others. Like hell I just looked and rust has 120k Viewers on twitch right now and its 5 am in the US .

[AceOfSpadesMM 554 / 10,358]

What would we do without you, @Roy🥰 Thank you for everything. 

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Update

I've talked to GSK and they should be able to get a new machine for us including the Intel i9-10900K in the next 72 hours or so. Unfortunately, they don't have any of the newer AMD CPUs in stock at the moment.

 

I am waiting for an update on the BGP session for our EU POP.

 

Thank you!

[Shuruia 3,145 / 28,023]

How feasible would it be to get CWRP or some of the Rust servers on the new machine?

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

We have retrieved the new machine and working to set it up now.