4Game

A lot of people are talking about the updating issues and why things are so slow, so I thought I'd do some math to put things in perspective.

The rough estimate of the # of people trying to update today was 100,000.

The size of the patch is 7183 megabytes.

That means, a total of 718,300,000 megabytes need to be downloaded.

If everyone had unlimited download capability on their home PCs, Battlestate Games would need 5,611,718 gigabit upload capable (128 megabytes, or 1024 megabits) servers to update everyone in one second.

Obviously that's unreasonable, so what about the approximately 7 hours that the patch has been available since this post was created? If all 100,000 users had finished fully updating right now, it would have taken 222 gigabit upload servers working at 100% efficiency.

That's still a bit high for an update system that probably needs <10 servers normally. So what if we spread the upload time across 24 hours from the patch release? It would take 65 gigabit upload speed servers working at 100% efficiency for 24 hours to update all of the users.

As a software engineer, I can say with experience that deploying a system with those kinds of numbers of servers is something companies put entire teams at work on. For a pretty rare event like the large .12 patch, its not unreasonable for the servers to be on fire just from the 100,000 people spamming check for update – let alone actually patching that much data.