The EVE Online devs are at it again with a new post about Team Gridlock's aggressive war on server lag. This time, Team Gridlock discusses degradation and how acknowledging the issues facing players with regard to lag actually helps them work to defeat the evil lag beast.
Gridlock has been spending a lot of our time to date reducing load via optimization. We can go further on this path - and very likely will - but we're at a point where a lot of the easy wins are behind us. Going multi-threaded falls into the increasing capacity category - it increases how much load can be processed per second, but never as much as most people think. We'll get there some day 'cause, well, we'll have to, but for today it's way more work for the benefit we'd see from it to be worth attacking.
Throttling load is a much more compelling proposition at this point, now that we've cleared out a pile of easy optimizations. A few different proposals on what we could do here have been put forward. The one most people jump to first is to have Destiny, our physics simulation, update at a lower resolution than once per second as we get overloaded. That would help lower the load of doing the actual simulation, but it turns out that only accounts for 5-10% of the load, so it wouldn't buy us much.
