Explanation of why the patch is slow!!!

Okay, I've seen a number of threads whining about why the patch is slow. Enough. Read this post, and then stop whining.

HOW CROSSFIRE & ONLINE GAMES WORK
Crossfire works because it allows users to communicate through a common server. This is basically just a really big computer Z8Games owns, and put in Toronto. The server has a static IP address, and is responsible for hosting a number of games, as well as these forums, and their website. Everytime someone does anything in game, or on the website, it goes through the server.

HOW SERVERS WORK
The server is basically responsible for serving your commands. You can login, play a game, download a file, make a post, etc. These all are done through the server. None of it is on your machine. This means, that everytime you do something, you are placing what is called a LOAD on the server, or requiring it to do some work for you.

SERVER LOAD
Typically, the crossfire servers probably see a few thousand requests per second. Maybe a max of 100,000 in a typical day. (I'm not really sure of the numbers). Z8Games anticipated this, and bought a server powerful enough to meet these demands, but they didn't buy a super powerful one because, well, they don't need it (and why spend an extra $100k on that super high end machine when it's just not necessary?). Now, sometimes, the devs release a patch (you all know what this is), and, like everything else, this is downloaded from the server, placing a load. However, the day after a patch, when all of the crossfire players want to download the patch (or worse, the entire game client), the servers are seeing a LOT of traffic. This is because they now have thousands of people requesting megs of data from the server. Now, whoever designed the server was smart. They made it so that each request is stored in a data structure called a QUEUE - basically earlier requests are server first. This means that if there are now millions of requests coming in, and the server can only handle hundreds of thousands, the queue is growing, and your requests aren't getting served immediately. This means your ping rises in game, your download speed suffers on the website, and page loading is slower, because the server is very busy.

So, you see, because there are not thousands of people trying to download terabytes of data from the server, it is seeing a huge load, and is coping by slowing everyone down a bit. What can you do about it? You can buy Z8Games some more servers, or disconnect and wait a while. There isn't really anyway to change your priority, sorry.

Now that I've explained to you why everything is a bit sluggish today, please, please, PLEASE, stop whining about it on the forums. Go read a book, play some flash games, get outside, whatever, just be patient and let the servers work things out on their end.

Hope you appreciated my little rant there. Any questions, or points (about mistakes I may have made ) please let me know. This post is intended as a friendly reminder, and a little lesson about computer engineering, because why use a computer if you don't know how it works?

Thanks for reading
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