HARDWARE
Infrastructure built for persistent worlds.
Two machines in a rack we own, in a room we can walk into. Everything below is what is in it and how it is arranged.
01 PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Physical infrastructure
The specifications below are read from the running hosts rather than copied from a datasheet. Where a figure has not been confirmed it is left out rather than estimated.
SPEC SHEET
- CPU
- Intel Core i9-10980XE
- MEMORY
- 256 GB
- STORAGE
- 5 TB NVMe
- NETWORK
- 1 GbE uplink
THE RACK
02 THE MACHINES
The machines
Photographs of the rack these two nodes are mounted in. Both live in the same cabinet, so no picture is captioned as one machine or the other.
NODE / 01 OPERATIONAL - CPU
- Intel Core i9-10980XE18C / 36T · up to 4.8 GHz
- MEMORY
- 256 GB
- STORAGE
- 5 TB NVMe
- NETWORK
- 1 GbE uplink
- PLATFORM
- Ubuntu 24.04 LTS · bare metal
- REGION
- US Central
NODE / 02 OPERATIONAL - CPU
- Intel Core i9-10980XE18C / 36T · up to 4.8 GHz
- MEMORY
- 256 GB
- STORAGE
- 5 TB NVMe
- NETWORK
- 1 GbE uplink
- PLATFORM
- Ubuntu 24.04 LTS · bare metal
- REGION
- US Central
Photographs of the rack these two nodes are mounted in. Specifications are read from the running hosts, not from a datasheet.
03 NODE TOPOLOGY
Node topology
How a request reaches a world: the panel decides, a node runs it, and the two are deliberately not the same machine.
-
NODE / 01 HEALTHY - CPU
- Intel Core i9-10980XE
- MEMORY
- 256 GB
- STORAGE
- 5 TB NVMe
- NETWORK
- 1 GbE uplink
ALLOCATION --AWAITING COMMISSIONING
-
NODE / 02 HEALTHY - CPU
- Intel Core i9-10980XE
- MEMORY
- 256 GB
- STORAGE
- 5 TB NVMe
- NETWORK
- 1 GbE uplink
ALLOCATION --AWAITING COMMISSIONING
04 COMPUTE
Compute
Game workloads run on dedicated compute nodes rather than beside the website. Our customised Pterodactyl platform decides which node a server lands on and manages it there, so a workload can be deployed, moved or restarted on its own.
05 MEMORY
Memory
Each server gets its own memory allocation from its plan, isolated from the servers beside it. We watch capacity across the nodes so that a busy neighbour never eats into what another customer was given.
- ALLOCATED
- HEADROOM
- RESERVED
06 STORAGE
Storage
World data sits on storage attached to the machine the server runs on, so saves are read and written locally rather than across a network. Infrastructure backups are kept apart from the servers they came from.
- WORLD VOLUME
- SNAPSHOT CHAIN
- ARCHIVE
07 NETWORK
Network
The public website, the game nodes and the services behind them are separated. Those components talk to each other over private paths, and customers reach only the services that are meant to be reachable.
- EDGE
- UPLINK
- NODE
- WORLD
08 DATABASE
Database
The panel keeps its state in a central MariaDB service, separate from both the web application and the game nodes. The panel connects to it when it deploys and while it runs, and schema migrations are applied as part of that deployment rather than by hand.
- PANEL STATE
- MARIADB SERVICE
- MIGRATIONS ON DEPLOY
09 DEPLOYMENT
Deployment
The panel ships as a container. A new version is built into a new image, the container is recreated from that image, and migrations run as it starts. The same steps every time, and nobody editing a running application to make a change.
- NEW IMAGE
- CONTAINER RECREATED
- MIGRATIONS RUN
- PANEL SERVING
10 SERVER ALLOCATION
Server allocation
When a server is created, the panel picks a game node with room and provisions what the plan calls for. The panel is the management layer; the game itself runs on the compute node, not on the web tier.
NODE CAPACITY
- INSTANCE
- UNALLOCATED
AWAITING COMMISSIONING
11 RELIABILITY / OPERATIONS
Reliability and operations
Website, database and game workloads are separate infrastructure roles. Maintenance or an update on one is far less able to take the others with it, and a fault has a smaller place to hide.
- MONITORING
- BACKUPS
- RESPONSE
- MAINTENANCE
HARDWARE
Bring a community, and it lands on this hardware.
Specifications are read from the running hosts rather than copied from a datasheet. Where a figure has not been confirmed it is left out rather than estimated.