Tranquility

Tranquility is a centralized server cluster, located in London. All players of EVE are playing on this single server cluster. The only exception to this is the Chinese server Serenity, which is only accessible by Chinese citizens. Beside this there are the public test servers Singularity and Multiplicity and several internal test servers.

Load Balancing

In front of the proxy servers there are multiple load balancers to share out incoming connections to the various servers in the proxy layer.

Proxy Layer

The proxy servers are the externally facing segment of the EVE cluster. Behind the load balancers, the proxy servers handle tasks such as connection negotiation, routing and data integrity checks. They route traffic to and from the Sol layer, which handles the actual game mechanics. They use a 4Gb/s fiber channel backbone to communicate with the Sol servers.

Hardware

• 8 * 3.3ghz Intel Wolfdale Blades (As of 2007)

Sol Layer

The Sol servers are the workhorses of Tranquility. If you are fighting, running missions or mining, all the processing for these activities is computed within these servers and shared out via various proxy servers to other clients.

Sol Blades

• Approximately 60 SOL blades, each with two dual-core processors (3.3Ghz CPUs)

Node

A node is a single EVE server process. This is the lowest level of granularity within the cluster. Each of EVE's 5000+ star systems is loaded to such a node. Many low-load solar systems can be operated by a single node. The server process uses approximately 30 megabytes of RAM without any loading. Each blade contains 4 Gb of RAM (as of 2007).

Database Server

This is the persistence layer of EVE Online. There is only one database server running Microsoft SQL Server 2008. This is backed up using online backups to the 'old' TQ DB hardware, a fiber channel RAID array. The current database resides entirely on solid state disk drives, two RAMSAN400 and 2 RAMSAN500 units from Texas Memory Systems. They are not SSD RAID disks, but rather single disk drives capable of high data throughput but crucially fully random requests. On traditional hard drives this incurs a lag due to disk seek operations while read heads are placed in the correct position on the platter and the data is read out.

At peak hours as of 2007 the database handles around 2-2.5k transactions per second, which generate roughly 40,000 input/output operations per second on the disks.

The server used is an IBM x3850 M2 server with 128 GB RAM and two 2.6 GHz six core Xeons (Dunnington) running Windows server 2008 x64 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

Network

Internally, the network for Tranquility consists of internal fiber channel 4Gb/s backbones, with internal database communication on a separate 10Gb/s backbone.

Externally, CCP peers with multiple external transit providers and essentially acts as a tier-3 ISP, with only one customer- Tranquility.

Resources

• DevBlog about Lag and TQ from November 2005
• DevBlog about TQ from October 2008
• Article on massively.com
• DevBlog about deploying the Ramsan 500
• DevBlog about hardware and software changes tn Tranquility
• Fanfest 2009 Server roundtable broadcast