Hi everyone,

For those who don't know me I am currently The Hive's lead developer and solutions architect. I want to thank L3gacy for making his blog post outlining the new layout we are considering for our pager system.

http://www.hivegamer.com/entry.php?2...reenShot-Pager

Here at Hive Gamer we have been taking time to work on optimizing our foundation. Although we've been in development for a while now we know that our software will be totally different from our competitors. I'll spend a bit of time writing about what I have been working on myself and with our team to ensure that we are able to deliver a great experience to our users. Our original design was based largely around our proof of concept, and although we were able to successfully stress test with over 1,000 users I knew that our goals are to support way more then that!

Recently I have sort of torn the guts out of the client and replaced it with a new brand system which provides a higher level of security, and performance. Our new system will manage itself when it comes to user load. One of the biggest concerns I had previously was handling my ideal user base which is about 50,000 users. I have designed our server components to be expanded dynamically without a prolonged server outage. In a matter of a few minutes we can double our infrastructure size. As this system develops further it will be able to "push" users from servers with higher utilization rates to a server with a lower utilization rate without them ever knowing.

With a new server structure in place I then turned to our pager. L3gacy and I knew that our pager will probably be one feature that is heavily used by everyone using our software. With our lobby system catering to individual games we know some may have higher loads then others. However with the pager we know it will probably maintain a high load all the time. Our pager system uses a simple connection to our server in order to pass data back and forth between users. My new pager model not only encrypts conversations, but sends them using compression (think zip files) over the network. This is designed in such a way that the server actually doesn't need to decrypt or decompress the data to know where it's going or who it's coming from. This allows us to leave the heavy lifting on the client, while stream lining our network for our users.

Without going into too much technical detail I can say that we are all very happy with our new system. I am currently in the process of implementing our new template to give more of a visual edge to our pager. This will also come with some stress testing code to ensure we can handle a large amount of users. As our network expands so will the capabilities of our software and we just want to say thank you for following us!