On the evening of November 1, 2020, "Honor of Kings" officially announced that the number of daily active users in 2020 would be 100 million, making it the first mobile game in China and even the world with an average daily DAU of over 100 million. At the same time, Tencent Cloud TcaplusDB, as the database service product of "Glory of the King", has become the world's first database that supports more than 100 million DAU games.
The success of any game is not accidental. "Honor of Kings" has made a lot of effort to ensure the challenge, fun and diversity of the game. There are dozens of systems alone, including combat systems, player systems, inscriptions, etc. . At present, the background data volume of "Honor of Kings" has reached hundreds of terabytes, and there are more than 100 tables in one district and it is still increasing. This has led to higher requirements for database performance, stability, scalability, cost, and game-specific scenarios in "Honor of Kings".
For "King of Glory", the database is the soul, carrying the information of all systems, and Tencent Cloud's self-developed distributed NoSQL database TcaplusDB, which is specially designed for games, has been providing a database for the core data of "King of Glory" for 5 years. service. It can be said that every player login, every game of battle, and every round of video playback is a test of TcaplusDB. Every team battle needs to be added, deleted, modified and checked in massive data.
"We have compared many databases. Under the current King's data capacity and concurrency conditions, the read and write latency of TcaplusDB is the most stable!" The relevant technical person in charge of "Glory of the King" commented. In his view, TcaplusDB's high concurrency, low latency, and low cost performance advantages provide strong support for the data operation and game business scenarios of "Glory of the King".
Specifically, TcaplusDB has nearly unlimited horizontal expansion capabilities. Based on the distributed technology of shard fragmentation, its single meter capacity can support 2.56 PB, and the throughput capacity increases linearly with hardware expansion. At the same time, through the separation of fast and slow requests and record-level locking, it can solve the isolation of complex requests and simple requests, reduce the lock range and improve the efficiency of reading and writing. In addition, based on innovative algorithms, TcaplusDB can realize the exchange of hot and cold data in one process, solving the problems of consistency, availability and management complexity of cross-process data exchange.
From the perspective of game business scenarios, TcaplusDB supports table-level and record-level data lifecycle management, which can effectively implement the expiration cleanup of activity data. In addition, based on cold standby data and binary log data, TcaplusDB can also perform rollbacks for full server level, table level, record level, or according to specified conditions, and the time is accurate to milliseconds.
On the other hand, in the face of the massive increase in the number of users, system stability and expansion have always been the focus of "Glory of the King".
Whether it is the annual "Black Festival", the DAU increase during the Spring Festival, or the planned expansion of the 5th anniversary celebration, TcaplusDB can respond to frequent expansion needs while ensuring the high availability of 5 9s.
In the Spring Festival of 2020, TcaplusDB expanded the capacity of 7 tables in each region 15 times, and the expanded cluster service only added 20 groups. For the last expansion, a sudden increase of 1 to 2 million PCU expansion was completed within 1 hour, and the player did not perceive the expansion process.
This is an almost impossible task, but TcaplusDB handed in a full score. How does it do it?
The first is to understand the application's automatic load balancing and overload protection. Taking overload protection as an example, TcaplusDB can perceive business overload from the perspective of a "game server", and comprehensively evaluate the load capacity of the database through indicators such as processing delay, queue length, success rate, etc., to protect high-load applications and prevent avalanches.
At the same time, TcaplusDB proposes different solutions for planned expansion and unplanned expansion. According to the actual situation, it can respond flexibly and deal with it flexibly. It also technically supports cross-availability zone and single device through automatic switching and repair of availability zone failures. Automatic fault switching and repair, which not only guarantees the speed and efficiency of expansion, but also achieves complete insensitivity to players.
It is worth mentioning that this is not the first time such a challenge has been faced. As early as the 2017 Spring Festival, TcaplusDB experienced seven consecutive days of late-night expansion. In the case of insufficient system capacity, it successfully passed the peak period by opening the read diversion avoidance program. During the S season, because the number of games players want to watch in the season exceeds the originally designed 10 games, TcaplusDB has carried out a large-scale modification of the table structure, and the emergency support for the modification of the table structure is insensitive to users.
After 8 years of internal gaming experience accumulated by Tencent, the TcaplusDB database has been widely used in hundreds of popular games such as "Glory of the King", "Stimulating the Battlefield", "Crossing the Line of Fire", "Naruto" and other hundreds of popular games, and through Tencent Cloud to global gaming Provide services.
In the future, as the mobile game market represented by "Glory of the King" enters a new level, Tencent Cloud Database will continue to invest resources to enrich the technology product ecology of the game industry, continuously improve comprehensive service capabilities, and help the mobile game market with high quality and speed increase.