Nearly four years ago, on September 16, 2004, CSFBL – the Computer Simulated Fantasy Baseball League (the greatest web-based multiplayer baseball simulation ever made, in my opinion, despite the long name) was migrated to what was (at the time) a hot new server. Performance was spectacular, and things stayed rather well… for a while…
Fast forward to 2008. CSFBL was crumbling under its own weight — and popularity. A game that was originally designed to handle a few hundred users now had thousands. More users meant more teams; more teams meant more games simulated; more games simulated meant more server utilization… The 3+ year old server, once handling the every-three-hour simulation in an hour and a half, took four or more hours to get it done. People were frustrated; I was frustrated. Something had to change.