The Auction House has been fairly problematic since the War Within’s launch. From general lag to it just not functioning at all, it’s just a big ol’ mess. Not to mention players getting 136 year-long auctions!
So What’s Up With the AH?
Today we had some interesting commentary from Senior Game Producer Tom Ellis, as he talks about what exactly is happening. Apparently it’s an issue of a table that once held around 50,000 rows now holding tens of millions after a design change, combined with some other coding changes. Those are rookie numbers!
The good news is that more hardware will be allocated to said table with the weekly reset. This is a temporary solution, so it can handle the giant amount of new data better. But there’s also a long-term solution being worked on, which should resolve the matter more definitively.
Here’s the full quote:
“So what’s going on with the Auction House is an interesting tech problem, a well meaning and simple design change caused a DB table that used to hold 20-60k rows to now contain tens of millions. Not a problem by itself but we’ve got some code changes to make to support this new world we live in. We’re going to throw more hardware at the problem with maintenance while people far more clever than me work on actual solutions.” – Tom Ellis
So let’s hope the new hardware can handle the tens of millions of rows!