New MasterServer - better server browser

Setti MasterServer started humbly in March 2006. It steadily gained popularity by delivering the most comprehensive list of public servers and being extremely reliable. The lift-off for Setti MasterServer happened on mid-April when DigitalZone released CS:S patch including Setti MasterServer. User amounts increased immediately 10 times what they had been. The effect cumulated as other releases started to feature Setti MasterServer too.

Currently Setti MasterServer has approximately 5000 users. There are on average 15 requests per minute in a day. At peak times there is one request every two seconds. Since March 2006 there has been nearly 4 million requests from all over the world.

The server itself is relatively simple. There are couple hundred lines of code written in Perl. Basically the server just gets list of servers, transforms it to compatible format and sends the result data back to a client. Server addresses are encoded with 6 bytes. First four digits of an IP address are formatted in one byte each, and a port number is formatted with two bytes in so called “unsigned network ordered short”. Server addressses are packed in 128 groups before sending them to a client.

Setti MasterServer daily requestsSetti MasterServer yearly requestsSetti MasterServer yearly growth

At this time there are about 2600 servers in Setti server list. That means there will be about 20 packets to be sent to a client. Every packet is 768 bytes in size, so the total cost for sending all servers to one client is 15 kb. Every day there are in total about 20000 requests, so the bandwidth consumption for the service is 320 MB per day. Surprisingly much.