IMC '05 Paper
[IMC '05 Technical Program]
Next: Introduction
| Chris Chambers |
Wu-chang Feng |
| Portland State University |
{chambers,wuchang} cs.pdx.edu |
| Sambit Sahu |
Debanjan Saha |
| IBM Research |
| {ssahu,dsaha}us.ibm.com |
 :
On-line games are a rapidly growing Internet application. Because of
the cost in supporting on-line games and the unpredictable load on
servers, companies are moving toward sharing infrastructure for game
hosting. To efficiently provision on-line games, it is important to
understand game workloads and the behavior of game players. In this
paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of a collection of on-line
game players and game workloads using data from several sources
including: a 13-month trace of an extremely busy game server
containing over 2.8 million connections, a two-year trace of the
aggregate game populations of over 500 on-line games, and a 4-month
trace of a content-distribution network used to deliver games. The
key findings from our measurement study are: (1) these gamers are an
extremely difficult set of users to satisfy and unless game servers
are properly set up and provisioned, gamers quickly choose to go
elsewhere, (2) the popularity of these games follows a power law
making games difficult to provision at launch time, (3) game workloads
are predictable only over short-term intervals, (4) there are
significant challenges in hosting games on shared infrastructure due
to temporal and geographic synchronization across different games and
other interactive applications, and (5) game software updates are a
significent burden on game hosting that must be planned for. Our
results have implications for both game publishers as well as
infrastructure providers.
Next: Introduction
2005-08-10
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