EVE Online devblog discusses recent 3000-player battle and server stability

Recently, we reported on the largest battle ever held in EVE Online. Over 3200 pilots clashed in the lawless nullsec system LXQ2-T. What was meant to be a titanic battle between the Northern Coalition political conglomeration and its rival Russian power block from the drone regions was quickly overcome with lag. Although it's impressive that the server didn't crash, pilots reported delays of several minutes between issuing a command and the server's carrying it out. In a new devblog, CCP Veritas looks at exactly what went on behind the scenes at that colossal battle.

While we play EVE Online in realtime, the server essentially queues up our commands and processes them in order. If the load becomes so high that more commands enter the queue every second than can be processed, our commands begin to be delayed and we experience that as lag. If you've ever been interested in what goes on under the hood of EVE's massively complex server, this devblog is definitely worth a read. If nothing else, it reinforces the fact that lag is a much more complex issue than we sometimes expect and progress in combating it involves painstaking work. In a future devblog, Veritas will present a historical look at the EVE server's performance and how it's been improved in the last few months as part of CCP's ongoing war on lag.