interview about technology behind the GW servers

since in this forum there has been a lot of speculation about what kind of OS and database GW was running on, I felt like it this interview was interesting to some of the posters

link to interview

it seems GW is running on a 64bit Windows Server and uses a MsSQL 2005 backend

Odd... I never thought of Microsoft severs as "reliable" lol

Eh, our Windows Servers (ranging from near obsolete NT4 to 2003R2) have a higher uptime then our Unix servers, the differences are marginal (0.5% on a quarterly basis) but still.

Anyway, it does not say in that article that Arenanet runs GW on Windows Server and SQL Server, it says NCSoft runs Lineage II on it, Arenanet could use something entirely different.

As if some of us didnt know thats what they are using

There's nothing wrong with any version of Windows, back in the good old days I ran an Ultima Online freeserver on a Win98 machine and it had uptimes of 5 months or more with hundreds of people playing on it.

One of my webservers still runs on 98 and has uptimes over a year.

I dont like XP and vista's eyecandy, but the Windows server editions are more stripped and proven to be stable.

They run MS SQL 2005 because it's way cheaper than Oracle.

I've read another article saying that GW is run on Windows 2003 with SQL 2005 too, but I'm sorry to say I can't remember the source.

All we know is that ANet has a brilliant budget and setup for thier server, seeing how they don't need to pay much to keep them running.

Oracle/IBM's DB2/MySQL/PostgreSQL are all alternatives to MSQL...

I'm curious why they picked MSQL (probably because they had to use NCSoft servers). Though you have to remember Arenanet's dev team basically learned from scratch for the most part so Microsoft would have been the easier way.

Edit: In the video they talk about network code, and how SQL Server 2005 has the best interface with regards to networks. That's probably the best reason.

The second reason they hinted at was the fact that it interfaces well with Microsoft Visual Studio.

Here's to hoping for Arenanet makes a crossplatform client (for Mac/Linux). It isn't going to happen if the tools they use are meant for optimized use in Windows, unlike Unreal Tournament (which is probably the most crossplatform multiplayer game, since its going to be on PS3, Xbx360, windows, Mac, Linux).