Auction House - 2 server?

[temporary]

Hi there

I was reading the Auction House Addon thread and people complaining about the lag with too much items....

I was wondering if we were able to setup the Auction House on a second server?

I Think blizzard does that?

[Morphau]

Don't compare Blizzard and us, it's not the same things ^^ !

You want make the same Auction House in two different server ?

[seanb]

No, he's wondering if the auctionhouse could be run on a second server.

Temporary, you've written some amazing help posts. if it wasn't for several of them, i wouldn't be running my server the way it is today. I'm surprised you would ask this, but i'm happy to lend a hand.

If you are asking about the auction house BOT addon, which places and removes auctions randomly, simulating a bigger markeplace than is actually there, then i would suggest people remove the auctionhouse bot code when the server gets big enough that you don't need it. Problem solved.

if you are asking about the auctionhouse itself, it's just a simple query manager. It can't really create lag. The network traffic made by the auction house is minimal compared to even a simple combat.

As for running it on a second server, no, that's not exactly possible. However you could move your SQL server to a second machine.

[Whyarp]

Quite some time back, there was a script you could run that would randomly populate the auction house with items.. perhaps something like this would be ideal for some people.. personally I like auction house bot, but do think that the core is complicated enough, and that if it was possible to have an external application to handle the auction house it would be pretty nifty..

Im probably over simplifying it, but for items to appear in the auction house you merely have to add them to characters > auctionhouse?..

[temporary]

Thanks Seanb

You know, with all this, i bought a cheap pc, made the server, wrote the guide then i didn't do anything with my server... i think the thrill was to build it and make everything work...i'm not even playing... of course i've tried a few things, test teh AH and all but tahts mostly it... lol

Perhaps one day....

But its there, if i want to!

But yes my question was to make the Auction House run on a second server...since most people complains that more items in the AH, makes the server lag and its true depending of your PC....

I know when i was playing on Blizzards server, the AH could be down but the server was still running....actualy it was at least 3 servers ....one for each continent and one for the AH Bot

[FragFrog]

More even, I believe they have special BG servers as well and independant instance servers also. I have worked with MuOnline, a very old MMO, for a few years - it had 12 seperate programs to run to get a server up, almost all of them could be on a seperate machine. A bit more work to setup, but the advantage was pretty clear: a crash in one part just meant a few people got kicked out of an instance, not a whole server having to restart. Quite helped with multithreading as well.

AH slowness is as far as I know related to the way item search used to be implemented. Has not been an issue for us lately, I would guess the problem is solved. At any rate moving the AH won't help much, you'd have to move the database to another server (or of course use a seperate database for AH, that might work and is probably fairly easy to accomplish).

[seanb]

Years and years ago i was a Guide on Everquest. Back then it meant a lot more than it does now. We were mini GM's, in contact with the administration, etc etc.

Anyway, just before a very large expansion a player wrote in with a "suggestion". He was angry that all the servers were going to be taken down for 24 hours to apply the expansion. His message was something like this....

(keep in mind that at the time, there were 43 live servers and 2 test servers available to the public)

" I'm a server administrator, and i've found through experience that it's better to take servers offline 5-7 at a time, rather than you guys taking all 45 offline at the same time. It's more efficient that way"

Wow, did i want to reach out and smack this knowitall. He clearly was NOT a "server administrator", because if he'd had any experience with servers at all, he'd have known how much bullshit his suggestion was. Further to that, the 45 game servers were not represented by 45 physical machines. The 45 game servers were backed by more than 1000 physical machines. Some global, some individual, some purely redundant. It was near impossible to take "5-7 down at a time", because once you started updating the code, they simply could not talk to each other any more.

[temporary]

I don't think Blizzard works the same way as Everquest. They usualy tend to handle everything perfectly. This is why they rarely close all the server at the same time. If you have the right structure, its not because one branch falls appart that all the others will follow.

[Patman128]

On retail servers there is a central proxy server (1 per realm) that routes traffic to whichever server it needs to go (chat, auction house, movement, etc.) Since there is no such thing on mangos, it isn't yet possible to seperate these things into different servers.

[noevidenz]

It appears to me that when running one of it's batch operations, the AHBot causes a large database load and prevents the core from querying the database in a timely manner.

It could even go so far as preventing it running queries all together, but I don't believe it's that severe.

I personally see no reason that the AHBot needs to be part of the Core. It has just about nothing to do with the AH Handler and Manager.

It doesn't really appear to make any significant changes to the MaNGOS code, just adds a couple of tiny customizations.

The way that I see it, and I don't want to belittle Xeross and everyone else working on the project because I love this particular addition, but having it as part of the core is simply clutter. It could just as easily be built as a separate process.

But that's my opinion, and as I'm new to this I may have missed something important.

Edit: As I failed to make clear above, it's not the Auction House that requires it's own server, it's the AHBot pummeling the database with thousands of queries that causes performance issues, and they're only intermittent.

The Auction House itself, in my opinion, is best off staying in the core.

[Whyarp]

I think it could be partly to do with adding Item_instance data aswell for every item added. If it was as easy as just adding data to the auctions db then im sure there would be more than one person having a crack at it. And if im wrong then tell me so I can go and have a go myself

[xeross155]

Just reduce the amount of items added per cycle or something, that should fix it up.

[temporary]

I know Xeross

I'm not having the problem at 5000 items per AH ...but i was wondering if something like that was possible, was already there or suggesting for the futur...

[Mephisto18m]

however, the AH could get its own db and - of course - its own MySQL-Server instance. With some tweaking any SQL-queries (from ahbot) on this server won't impact on the overall gameplay experience.

Just an idea from someone who is waiting for the ahbot run to finish...