Doctacosa

Something has happened a few days ago that's gone unnoticed by the majority here: with the recent release of the Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection, the Mega Man website I run, Dr. Cossack's Lab, had a major increase in traffic. I expected the maps section to be popular, but not this much!

Simply put, the traffic on the website increased by a factor of 50. That's not 50%, it's 50 times. Yes, that's a lot of people! Thankfully, I have plenty of spare capacity on the website, and the site structure itself is light, so it can handle a sudden burst of traffic without causing slowdowns. That's a good thing, too, because other pages such as the main site of the Creeper's Lab are hosted there too!

It's also important to be able to handle an increase of players in-game. The network currently has a global limit of 50, the lobby and Laurasia accept 30, with the other servers being at 20. Could they handle more? Yes, but it would probably lag, and that's no fun. Laurasia has pushed the 30 simultaneous players before, and we could feel the impact yet it remained playable. Having sane limits helps with this.

Setting realistic limits also helps to curb some attacks. Some tools let people login multiple player bodies at once in a game server, which someone once tried to do in the lobby. Since the lobby has a limit of 30, though, the wave stopped there. A higher limit could look more inviting (“wow, there can be a thousand players at once here!”), but in this case, it could have led the server to crash. Nothing happened, in the end: all accounts got disconnected, a swift IP ban was added, and we never heard from it again.

Keeping structures simple can also help to deal with an unexpected increase in visitors: the simpler the web page, or the fewer plugins a game server runs, the better they can handle many people using the same resources. I prefer not to overengineer anything, as it makes things easier to maintain and growing pains fewer to deal with!

For now, we have plenty of capacity to spare. If you see someone new around, say hello and invite them to stay, we can handle it!

– Doctacosa