Thanks XBain and eR33t. How many servers are you looking to have up?
With the hardware we have right now, I'd say that we could easily run 20 full 12-player servers. It really comes down to demand though. If we're finding that we only need 4 match servers and one public server, then that's all we'll run. If match servers are filling up at peak hours, then we'll expand to 6 or 8. If people need to start hammering our public server for a slot, maybe we'll open up a second server.
We opted to go with better hardware so that we can afford to run services on the same system with little effect on the performance of the PB2 servers. Our PB2 servers are sliced into their own environment which gives them exclusive rights to the operating system, filesystem, network link, memory, etc.. This is good for a couple reasons. First it gives us the ability to reallocate disk space, memory and processors with very little effort if the PB2 servers ever need it. Secondly, it's a not sharing any of these resources with the other services and processes running along side of it. When we were doing intensive stats parsing on the original eR33t servers (2 full 12-16 player servers simultaneous for 90% of the NA afternoon and evening), everyone would get a 4-5s lag spike every 20 minutes on the :00 :20 and :40. These sorts of problems are going to be prevented since the environment for the servers isn't sharing memory/cpu with the webserver.
With it's own isolated operating system, we can really begin optimizing different areas of the stack to yield better performance for the game servers and not having to worry about any additional services.
I don't want to turn this entire thread into another PBCup discussion, but I feel that we cannot have NA/EU teams consolidated into one big event. I spent a lot of time
out of position and trying to satisfy the basic needs of EU teams in the PBCup last year. With that experience, I have a couple better ideas now of how to run a NA/EU league, but I think it would be far easier to run two seperate leagues. That being said and depending on how things go in the next couple weeks, I wouldn't mind collaborating with the Europaint guys to come up with a format that could see the top team from continent to face off in a
World Championships match to end off a season.