People had 10,000 active AH Auctions !

[Slipmat]

In case you wondered why the AH in Rift was behaving very slow with searches and items appearing, one of the Devs, Pithos, posted explaining why.

Seems some people had up to 10,000 auctions running on the AH at once !! how the f**k they put 10,000 individual items up, who knows

They've now hotfixed in a limit of 200 items, it wouldn't affect current items on AH so may take a few days for the excess to filter out and AH to return to normal

New Auction House Posting Limit

Hello everyone,

There was one change in this hotfix that made it in at the very last minute and didn't make it in to the initial patch notes (they have since been updated).

We've added a limit of 200 auctions per character to the Auction House.

Many of you have noticed Auction House searches have been running slowly lately. We've tracked this down to the large number of active auctions. Auction House addons (such as BananAH) have made it very easy to create large numbers of auctions, more than the processing dedicated to Auction House requests can currently handle well.

A small number of players are responsible for a huge number of these auctions - on the two shards I checked, there were a couple characters with close to 10,000 active auctions.

As such, to restore performance for a majority of our players, we're adding a cap to the number of auctions a single character can have active. Based on looking at the number of auctions players had active, we've decided to start this at 200.

Players with existing auctions will have those auctions active until they end normally. As such, it may take up to 3 days from the time of the patch for AH speed to return to "normal" again.

Our apologies to players affected by the new auction cap.

We hope to be able to increase the number of auctions players can post in the future - but we're just in the idea stage regarding this at the moment. Of course, engineering optimizations could allow for greater capacity, but we've also been talking about various ideas to encourage more reasonable use of the AH, such as higher or different auction fees. If you have any suggestions, about fair and reasonable changes we could make, please feel free to respond to this post and we'll read them over.

Thanks,
Pithos

Source: http://forums.riftgame.com/general-d...ing-limit.html

[Deleted]

cant... resist.... It's over 9000!!!
And how can you have the mental power to put up 10k actions?! that's insane O.o

[loki504]

maybe there is a bot or a addon like in wow?

[Arbs]

Only a bot can truely achieve this, No person could litterally have anough time to post 10,000 individual items.

[Onorvele]

BananAH.

I used to maintain about 300-500 active auctions, for artifacts mostly. Took me 20-30 minutes every 24 hours to maintain that many, but I'm not using batch post functionality to automatically post all items in my bags.

This is a slightly annoying change - I'll not be able to list all artifacts I have all the time now.

[theWocky]

FROM MY POST ON THE RIFT FORUMS IN RESPONSE TO THIS GUY:

Quote Originally Posted by Ardor View Post
Just curious, what's the AH cap in WoW? I haven't played it in a while.



I said:

I don't believe there is one. I've posted thousands on that AH.

Heck, In late Vanilla, I had a lvl 7 rogue that had over 18,000 gold. Their AH handles it just fine.

People are jumping up and down like 10,000 is such a huge number. It's not - even if multiplied by 10,000 people, it's not that much in the scheme of things. It's a few bytes per record. How much data do they need to store to keep track of an item? 30 bytes maybe?
30 bytes per transaction is a bit generous in my opinion.

Let's be unrealistic and say:
10,000 people x EACH having 10,000 auctions x 30bytes = 3,000,000,000 bytes /1024
2929687.5k / 1024
2,861Mb / 1024

2,79 Gb at a time, maybe 3x that for a database, call it 8gb max? Most modern database systems will search this in milliseconds.

Hardly a big database. My friggin mailbox is 23gb at the office.

GW2 doesn't have any issues either - and that is "one" Auction house for every server in the world, I believe.

Yeah, optimizations are needed, it appears - not just to the graphical engine - or... maybe there really is another motive for this. Maybe some people are making too much easy money on the Auction House? Or maybe they can't afford decent servers?


EDIT: (couldn't put this on the Rift forums - too late): If people say: "the person's name is more than x number of bytes" - I say to them - only an idiot programmer would store a full person's name or bidder's name for every transaction. Relational Databases, when used properly don't work that way and this would border on gross programming incompetency if this was done this way. A player ID attached to a look-up would be practical.

[Rennadrel]

You have to remember that Rift in terms of raw data is a larger game running on less servers and less dedicated hardware. Odds are Blizzard has independent data services for the auction house system, not to mention it's been in place for a decade now, their caching and data retrieval system is probably faster.

[theWocky]

You have to remember that Rift in terms of raw data is a larger game running on less servers and less dedicated hardware. Odds are Blizzard has independent data services for the auction house system, not to mention it's been in place for a decade now, their caching and data retrieval system is probably faster.

Granted, but their lack of hardware is not the customer's issue.

And... my example was an extreme - there isn't going to be 10,000 people EACH posting 10,000 auctions each day per shard. That database is probably less than a Gigabyte in size for three days of data.

[Onorvele]

Let's be unrealistic and say:
10,000 people x EACH having 10,000 auctions x 30bytes = 3,000,000,000 bytes /1024
2929687.5k / 1024
2,861Mb / 1024

2,79 Gb at a time, maybe 3x that for a database, call it 8gb max? Most modern database systems will search this in milliseconds.

Hardly a big database. My friggin mailbox is 23gb at the office.

Fundamentally, I agree that the AH should be able to handle a larger size than 200 listings per person. However, the difference between your 23 GB mail database and the Rift AH is that only you access the mail database.

However, it's not just the size that matters - it's the structure. And you'd be surprised how costly spanning a database across multiple servers is, in terms of throughput.

If we assume that these shard consolidations are being done logically but not physically (as in, several physical servers will be used by a single consolidated shard), and that each server ends up containing its own instance of the AH that allows input and requires synchronization across all servers for the consolidated shard, it's a pretty obvious root cause. Maintaining database sync from multiple inputs is costly, and a much better design would be to have the AH database on a single server, independent of the world servers.

Now, Trion may already have set up a single, independent AH server for each consolidated shard (they do have some error handling when you try to buyout an auction that no longer exists based on client-cached data), but I'd bet at a few hundred plat that the problems they're running into are actually coming from having multiple database on multiple servers, all accepting input and trying to keep each other in sync.

[theWocky]

Fundamentally, I agree that the AH should be able to handle a larger size than 200 listings per person. However, the difference between your 23 GB mail database and the Rift AH is that only you access the mail database.

I admit that was a bad example and should have clarified it better or used a different example.

As an ex programmer, seriously, 2.7gb for a database, even 100gb is nothing on a modern SQL -type database system - especially as they only display limited items per page. Multiple users simultaneously accessing a database is hardly a big thing either considering the size per line item/auction - you're at working with 600 bytes per page that gets refreshed.

I still suspect this is motivated more towards limiting the amount of platinum each person can generate each day or just bad code optimization.

Once again - regarding their lack of hardware, that's their issue, not ours to resolve - if they lack computing power, or don't configure/optimize properly, that's their thing to resolve, not to just use a cop-out like this.

[Onorvele]

I still suspect this is motivated more towards limiting the amount of platinum each person can generate each day or just bad code optimization.

Given the extreme degradation in AH performance since the most recent merge, I have to stick with my initial interpretation - it's bad code, bad systems design, bad architecture.

The game was designed to run a single shard on a single, physical server. They've figured out how to make characters cross physical servers, but the AH is trying to span and maintain sync, which is a disaster.