Masterservers upgrade

Both HL1 and HL2 masterservers were upgraded on 2008-02-10.

The masterservers used to be simple creatures, which sent all servers on one request. The system worked well with relatively small few hundred CSS server list, which could be sent in couple 200 server packets. The HL1 server list is much bigger. There are over two thousand servers, which require at least ten packets to list all servers. (The limitation of number of servers in one packet comes from the maximum size for UDP packet.)

The whole list of few thousand servers list, packed in a very compact form used by the game, took somewhere about dozen kilobytes of size. At peak times there were over hundred requests per minute to the masterservers, so the masterservers sent data out about 20 to 25 kilobytes per second. It’s almost nothing on high speed 100 Mbps network, but it wasn’t nice to send all the data at once because the clients expect only one packet, after which they request for more.

Now the masterservers work more like Valve’s masterservers. Valve’s masterservers still have better logic of sending first the lowest ping servers. It’s not big issue with Setti masterservers, because regardless of the order in which the servers are sent, it takes only second to get the full list.

Setti Masterserver

Setti Masterserver usage statistics