Interesting post from WoW general forum.

[Malakar]

Well I guess I was not clear. I didn't mean to dispute that the servers are high stress, I think it's pretty clear that they're under extremely high stress. I meant to say I don't see how that naturally requires high ongoing costs, after you have built and tweaked the system.

What I'm trying to say is that yes, it's a massive and highly complex system. But eventually, assuming no core system changes are needed, they should be able to get it running pretty smoothly with little interaction needed.

I'd like to learn what makes this technology so inherently different from what I'm familiar with.

Let me try to explain what I meant by this.

I've dealt with servers that are nowhere near the same ballpark as the capacity or scale of MMO servers. But they're still computer technology, so they should have some basic similarities. I'd expect that their hardware does not simply die when put under loads that are too heavy, rather you'd get serious lag. I'd expect that their software may experience extreme bottlenecks too, which would also cause lag. I'd expect some crashes. But that's in the beginning. I'd also expect for the system to be able to be smoothened out eventually, to the point that its maintenance can be relatively automated assuming no core changes.