[The story behind the server side] Interview | Honest thoughts of the engineer in charge of Rewrite IgnisMemoria

This is Nakauchi from the technical sales department.

I asked Visual Arts about the server side of "Rewrite IgnisMemoria" (hereinafter referred to as RewriteIM) released on February 6, 2017.

The second half will be a conversation between Visual Arts engineer Koki Yamada and our engineer Ryosuke Sashihara.

↑Visual arts engineer Koki Yamada

Reply to everything on Twitter to your followers

- Thank you for your time today. First of all, please tell us about the characteristics of Visual Arts.

The company has been in business for over 20 years, and originally started with PC games, and along the way they Key , and started making games in the so-called "Naki-game" genre, and that's their basic form.

I originally made games, but I started a franchise business where I created game engines and rented them out to other companies.

In terms of content, we support the development companies that use the game engine, and the development companies focus on making the game, while we take over the sales and other aspects of running the game. That is the stance.

- When did you start playing social games?

As for social games, I started dabbling in them about 4 or 5 years ago, and my first game was ``Little Busters! Card Mission,'' which I released on DeNA's mobage.

This game was created by Soichiro Fuki, the producer of this game, RewriteIM, as the director. It all started from here.

The second work is "Angel Beats!" and this RewriteIM is the third work.

- Did team Aeca exist from the beginning when you started playing social games?

No, it wasn't there from the beginning.
At first it was called Social Team.
We didn't have a special team name, but we just created a team that wanted to create a social game.

After that, another team started up and created "Angel Beats!".

However, there was some dissatisfaction from the people in the field who said, ``We can't operate it with such a small number of people,'' so we decided to do it as one team, and the result was ``
team Aeca.'' Become.

- How many members are there in team Aeca?

There are 9 people.

- 9 people!? That's not many, right? . .

Yes, it's less!
! After all, I'm one of the people running the server (lol).
The people on Twitter !

- Do you have twitter too?
! Come to think of it, I send replies to everything on Twitter to my followers, but isn't that difficult?

Yes, it's tough (lol)
, but we're doing it with the users in mind.
I think it would be great to receive an official response.

So, I try to reply to messages from users as much as possible, and I've been doing this since the days of "Angel Beats!".

- Visual Arts has many popular IPs, but
do you have plans to continue releasing social games in the future?

I agree. There is a possibility of "Charlotte", which was aired as a TV anime in 2015, or maybe "team Aeca" will launch a new IP.

It hasn't been decided yet!

- Mr. Yamada, I would like to ask you about yourself personally. What led you to become an infrastructure engineer?

My previous job was at an independent IT company, and before that I was a freelancer...

- Huh? Did you start out as a freelancer?

Yes, it is. That's rare (lol)

I started working as a freelancer at an independent IT company, but it wasn't very interesting, so I quit, and after about a year I went back to freelance and thought it would be interesting to work at a different company, so I came to this company.

When I first joined the company, I was creating websites and web systems, but I didn't do anything related to infrastructure,
but I actually started working on infrastructure with my previous work, ``Angel Beats!''.

Since we are not originally a social game company, we don't have infrastructure engineers or network engineers.

Just don't let the server go down

- What aspects did you pay attention to when developing the server side this time?

What I paid attention to was load balancing and ensuring that the server did not crash.
We were trying to do something about load balancing so that if something happened, we could distribute it and survive.

I couldn't do that with "Angel Beats!"...

We started with 6 cars (lol)

- You're going to die, that is.

To begin with, I didn't even know how to distribute the load.

Normally, this is a web, this is a DB, this is memcached, etc., but there were so many users that it was
unbearable.

- Did you come here before RewriteIM?

RewriteIM is coming.

- Still, it's 6 machines with Web and DB, so it's not bad.

Yes, you can die lol

At first, I started with 3 Web servers, 2 DB servers, and 1 memcached server, but of course it crashed, and the first thing that happened was the Web server died, so I decided to increase the number of Web servers by about 30.

Because I increased it too much, the number of connections increased so much that it became impossible to connect to memcached, and finally the DB became flat.

However, at that time I didn't even think about distributing the DB, so I set aside a one-month maintenance period and rebuilt everything.

- How many servers did you have after rebuilding?

In the end, there were about 80 units.

I'm glad I was able to do the load test that well.

- Mr. Yamada, where did you find it difficult this time?

Mr. Yamada : It's a load test.

Sashihara: That almost broke my heart.

Mr. Yamada: I think the DB was pretty neat this time...

Sashihara: That's right. But I wonder why it's falling.

Mr. Yamada: That's right. In the end, I still haven't solved the problem of it crashing under high load.

Sashihara: So we had to release it in a rather scary situation, but I'm
glad we managed to make it.

Mr. Yamada: Currently (at the time of the interview, March 2, 2017), the number of users is around 800,000, but the previous work "Angel Beats!" has been around 600,000 in two years, so it has already surpassed that number even though it has only been a month. .

Sashihara: When I first released it, I was counting the number of users in the DB.
The number of users was increasing rapidly, so I was worried about whether it would be okay.

Mr. Yamada: If anything, the CDN for downloads has become ridiculous.

Sashihara: The amount of traffic on the CDN has become enormous.

Mr. Yamada: Currently it's around 400TB.

Sashihara: That's about it.

Mr. Yamada: So I asked my engineers to somehow reduce the number of downloads, but there's
no way they can reduce the number of downloads.

Sashihara: The first download was quite large.

Mr. Yamada: It's big. It was about 580MB.

Sashihara: That's what it feels like to go to CDN, so that's about it.

Mr. Yamada: Still, the most difficult thing was, let me go back to the topic, the load test was really difficult.
But I think it was a good thing that we were able to do that much load testing.

Sashihara: Thank you for working with me even when I was working night shift.

Mr. Yamada: Actually, we didn't meet up, we just stayed at the office (lol).

Sashihara: When I did it with Buttushi, I was a little unconscious (lol)

Mr. Yamada: I stayed up all night (lol)

Sashihara: On Saturdays and Sundays before the release...

Mr. Yamada: I lived at the company! !

Sashihara: I also felt like I was going home to take a bath (lol)

Mr. Yamada: There was a public bath near my house that opened at 10am, so I used to go there all the time.

- Lastly, please tell us what you thought after using Beyond's services.

I feel very grateful that you have been so kind to me.

Also, the price is low! !

The fact that I was able to sleep without any problems was a big deal.
I can sleep, I don't get calls in the middle of the night, and I do
n't have to get calls at 5:00 a.m. and then go straight to work on my PC at home, which is really nice.

- That's it for the interview. Thank you for today.

[Cloud construction/operation maintenance/monitoring] Rewrite IgnisMemoria (game) | Visual Arts