what even *is* sharding and cold storage?

Drammanoth

They could actually release the toons' names that go into the freezer - why should some cool, lore-friendly names be held by people who haven't been logging for several years? (And yes, I did see 24+ months)

coletas

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

RawBrightSilver wrote: »

One problem that users sometimes encounter after having sharded a database is that the shards eventually become unbalanced. If that occurs, any benefits of sharding the database are canceled out by slowdowns and crashes. The database would likely need to be repaired and resharded to allow for a more even data distribution.

Have we been experiencing anything like that lately?

I doubt it. From what I understand there's only one live shard. Pulling things into the live shard is done by single users, so whatever performance cost would probably be borne by that user in terms of load times. As far as writing to the db it shouldn't be any more intensive, or generally frequent, than a new character or account being created. As for moving things off the live shard I would hope that's something done biweekly during the maintenance.

If the performance issues are due to sharding then it might be that they did some other db change besides that at the same time, but the sharding itself, in their implementation, shouldn't cause those issues.

It can be extremely more intensive if they are using a clustered index. Is not even similar to get all the data on a single pass and cluster it than make that pass everytime someone is logging and having to reorder (and locking) that full shard. And well... It just doesnt have any sense to do it that way...