Real-time load balancing in an interactive multiplayer game server

Abstract

In this paper we investigate optimal load balancing strategies for a scalable parallel game server architecture. Our work develops from an existing multi-threaded implementation of the QuakeWorld game server: we investigate the comparative effectiveness of different load-balancing algorithms, and determine how different metrics can be used to analyse performance. We find that achieving optimal QuakeWorld server performance is a trade-off between consistently achieving an even workload distribution whilst reducing intra-frame wait time, and that a combined set of metrics is required to fully understand how load balancing affects server performance