Game Server

Running a game server doesn't end when the game is installed — that's where the actual work starts. The articles in this category cover the operations side: preparing a server on Linux, tuning it for performance, building a backup strategy, protecting against DDoS, and setting up monitoring. I learned by doing that when player counts climb, the first thing to fall over is usually not the game but the database or disk I/O; that a backup only counts as a backup once you've tried restoring it; and that monitoring has to be in place before something breaks, not after. The goal is to give anyone running their own server enough foundation to understand what happened instead of panic-searching at midnight.