Playkey DevLog. Issue 45
Hey! This is a report on what has been going on in the past few months! And let us tell you, these months were very hot in every possible way. The hottest news is that the platform keeps growing. The number of our miners has doubled within the last two months. It is largely connected with the self-isolation period, as a lot of gaming cafes have lost the ability to host clients and are moving their operation online.
A large portion of all the improvements and optimizations made within the past two months were focused on making it easier to join and work with our decentralized platform.
- We’ve optimized the process of downloading updates. Now the critical game updates can be installed simultaneously, which lowers the idle time for servers. So, miners can earn more, players can enjoy their games faster (and our tech support has fewer complaints about the queues).
- Thanks to our miners (we appreciate your help, friends!) we have discovered flaws in CPU resource allocation. It will take some time before we can fix this entirely, but even now virtual machine (VM) boot time for AMD Ryzen CPUs was cut in half and by 10% for Intel based CPUs.
- Yet another massive revelation for us based on the feedback from our miners has been the fact that good old-fashioned HDDs are not made for cloud-gaming. As a result, we had to increase our requirements for unfolding the servers, to keep the gaming sessions stable and enjoyable. With the changes made, we’ve been able to decrease loading times for Call of Duty: Warzone from 40 seconds to just 5. And this also fixed the bug when textures would disappear in GTA V, which was reported by our users. In addition to that, while adding new servers, we have decided to test not just the graphics and games, but also the disks to ensure that there are no servers with slow drives.
- We successfully tested launching games on two VMs from local Network-Attached Storage (NAS) with a full library of games. This is a really important point because it entirely solves the problem of rather small SSDs. A miner’s machine is only as popular as a selection of games it can offer. Unfortunately, an SSD with 512–1024 gigs of storage makes the selection very limited. Local NAS is a perfect solution for this as it can store hundreds of games right next to the powerful PCs.
- It is evident that when it comes to NAS, data transfer speed from NAS to a VM becomes a very important question. Currently we are testing different transfer rates, 2,5, 5 and 10 Gbit per second. If all goes well, this might be the solution to our problem of scaling the decentralized network, while also offering a wider selection of games on decentralized servers.
- One more thing, we have successfully implemented network data exchange between decentralized servers and the master server which distributes updates in a local sub-network (which was also described in the previous issue). Basically, the updates are distributed using the torrent technology. This is to ensure that the miners’ games are updated in the shortest time possible. As of now we are monitoring the impact it has on the servers’ performance and gameplay experience.
This may seem like a good spot to end the issue, however, we have one more announcement to make. In issue 43 we wrote about monitoring GEOIP data, and here are the results, the majority of players are from the following countries.
- Russia
- Ukraine
- Belarus
- Kazakhstan
- USA
- United Kingdom
The majority of miners are from Russia and Ukraine, and here is the important part: WE ARE REALLY LOOKING FOR MINERS FROM BELARUS AND KAZAKHSTAN! You can apply to join the network at https://playkey.io/en/miners/
That is all the news we have for now. See you in a month!
