The Tranquility Upgrade Is Complete

I think some EVE Online players were disappointed at the late release of the Crimson Harvest event this year. Events like the Crimson Harvest usually launch on the main Tranquility cluster two days after a major patch. Normally, that would have occurred on 21 October, two days after the release of the Summon The Swarm update. Instead, the Crimson Harvest goes live tomorrow.

Clean off your ship and get your costumes ready, the Crimson Harvest returns this Thursday 28 October with an all new twist!#Tweetfleet #EVEOnline pic.twitter.com/a367sfib3I

— EVE Online (@EveOnline) October 26, 2021

Why the delay? I believe the upgrades to Tranquility play a large role. The good news is, the upgrades are complete. CCP Explorer tweeted about the status yesterday.

The second downtime was today and the New Eden matrix is now running on top of brand-new DB hardware and SAN. It's also using SQL Server 2019. We're doing the third downtime tomorrow but @CCPDeNormalized has promised me that it will not be extended.

— CCP Explorer (@CCP_Explorer) October 26, 2021

Yes, the post is going to consist of a lot of tweets from CCP Explorer. But he answered a few good questions. First, what type of hardware was inserted into the mix.

This is a Dell PowerEdge R750 with 32 physical cores, 4 TB of RAM, 32 Gb fibre, and connected to a new SAN storage. It is more the combination of these new machines with the new SAN where we anticipate improvements since the current machines sometimes overwhelm the current SAN.

— CCP Explorer (@CCP_Explorer) October 21, 2021

I'll have to admit, the next tweet made me laugh out loud in real life, but not in an EVE Online context.

AWS doesn't offer the raw performance we need for the simulation. We use AWS for domain services but host the game cluster ourselves.

— CCP Explorer (@CCP_Explorer) October 20, 2021

The reason for the laughter is that Star Citizen is running on Amazon Web Service servers. If CCP has determined that the AWS servers are not powerful enough to host EVE, how are they powerful enough to host something as complex as Star Citizen?

Yes; neither the performance we needed and the cost was outrageous.

— CCP Explorer (@CCP_Explorer) October 21, 2021

I know that user numbers in EVE have been down the last couple of weeks. Hopefully the Crimson Harvest event will draw players in and we'll get to see if the latest infrastructure changes have made a difference in Tranquility's performance.