Europe / German Server Ping Rates

[Kevin]

It is interesting that the worst examples of poor performance - the AH and mailboxes - are ones which involve database access.  It is good architectural practice to host your database and applications on different servers, but I would guess Blizzard haven't done this (because character transfers are such a big deal.  If the database were separate from the servers it would not be necessary to transfer any data, just update the field containing the server name on the database record).
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Each "server" is a cluster. Each continent has it's own server, the items and characters are on another server, instances are on another server, etc (though it's very likely that each server is a virtual machine on the same hardware set, I was very used to one physical box being 15 servers and where you could lose just one of those 15 servers or networking for just one of those 15, etc). The clusters don't really talk to each other. That is why the character transfers are a big deal. When you already have a cluster that is a single server to the client inter connecting that to another cluster and keeping info synched becomes more difficult.

But yeah a character for Tichondrius is not on the same server as a character for Stormrage, heck in that case those phsyical machines are probably several thousand miles apart. With how much data is associated with each character and how many characters a person can have, yeah there is no single massive character database. Each server has it's own. This is also one of the technical hurdles for cross server battle grounds. Physical server host in Virginia and another in California, clients in Wisconsin and Arizona. You have to make sure that all that battleground stuff is synched up now between physical servers thousands of miles away. Of course the answer is to portal you all to another physical box but of course you still need to route that to the clients and the you have to verify item integrity two two or more physical clusters that the new battleground isn't a part of.

So depending on what the core network architecture is it really isn't simple to just hook this and this together, keep it secure, and have it perform well. Networks are not infinitely expandable, some things require reforming the network entirely. Though much of that is security concerns.