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Game workloads are synchronized
There are two ways games can be multiplexed with each other.
One way would be to coarsely and statically assign physical servers
to particular games based on the popularity of the game. Results from
Section 4 clearly show that this can provide a lot of
benefit for game companies. Another way
would be to dynamically re-allocate servers based on instantaneous demand
for a particular game.
An implicit assumption that gives value to
the latter method is that different games have usage patterns that
are substantially different. Thus, rather than have each game provision server
resources based on the peak usage of their game, server resources would be
provisioned for the global peak.
2:
Mean player populations for week of May 23, 2004
Game |
Average number of players |
Half-Life |
80324 |
America's Army |
5791 |
Battlefield 1942 |
5402 |
Neverwinter Nights |
4579 |
|
In order to investigate the extent to which different games can be
multiplexed with each other, we examined the aggregate player
populations of four popular games. The games examined include FPS
games (Half-Life, Battlefield 1942, and America's Army), as well as an
MMORPG (Neverwinter Nights). Player populations of these games were
collected over a one week period (Sunday May 23, 2004 to Saturday May
29, 2004) from the GameSpy trace. In order to compare the games
directly, independent of their popularity, each game's population data
was normalized by the mean population for that particular game during
the week. Table 2 lists the mean player
populations for the four games examined. Figure 11
plots the normalized player loads for the four games during the one
week period. As the figure shows, player populations fluctuate
significantly based on the time of day from lows close to half of the
mean to peaks close to twice the mean. In addition, populations
across games have peaks in close proximity to each other, making it
difficult to achieve significant statistical multiplexing gain between
different games. Finally, as indicated in the FFTs from
Figure 8, games show slight peaks on the weekends with
slightly more players on-line than during the week.
11:
Aggregate normalized load across four popular games for week of
May 23, 2004
|
3:
Web site logs for week of August 13, 2001
North American cereal manufacturer |
Start time |
Mon Aug 13 2001 |
End time |
Sun Aug 19 2001 |
Total requests |
10,368,896 |
Content transferred |
59.6 GB |
|
North American credit card company |
Start time |
Tue Aug 14 2001 |
End time |
Mon Aug 20 2001 |
Total requests |
112,590,195 |
Content transferred |
366.4 GB |
|
International beverage manufacturer |
Start time |
Tue Aug 14 2001 |
End time |
Sat Aug 18 2001 |
Total requests |
11,932,946 |
Geographically resolvable |
11,829,429 |
Content transferred |
51.1 GB |
|
12:
Aggregate normalized load between Half-Life and commercial web sites
|
|
|
(a) North American cereal |
(b) North American credit |
(c) International beverage |
manufacturer |
card company |
manufacturer |
|
Next: Games and interactive application
Up: Potential for multiplexing gain
Previous: Potential for multiplexing gain
2005-08-10