Loading A Shard In Rift
| Overall Statistics | Rift: Realm Loading |
|---|---|
| Elapsed Time | 00:15 |
| Read Operations | 8 682 |
| Write Operations | 85 |
| Data Read | 322.98 MB |
| Data Written | 1.16 MB |
| Disk Busy Time | 1.37 s |
| Average Data Rate | 237.14 MB/s |
Like most MMORPGs, Trion Worlds purposely designed Rift to have a more modular file system. Updates from the developer are distributed as archives, which are decompressed and extracted to their proper locations. This works well because adding a few files can easily expand the Rift universe.
However, it also translates into storing a lot of individual files of varying sizes, which translates into a random I/O workload involving mixed transfer sizes. That’s what we see here when we load to Silverwood.
Random performance on a hard drive is very modest compared to SSDs, which is why Rift gamers are going to experience a bigger speed-up loading into their character from an SSD than anyone playing F1 2011 might see starting a race.
I/O Trends:
- 44% of all operations are 64 KB in transfer size
- 48% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
- 18% of all operations occur at a queue depth of two
- 19% of all operations occur between a queue depth of three and seven
- 94% of all operations are random