Thread: [634] (Absolutely useless) load balancing

Originally Posted by clem585

From a theorical standpoint, returning the server IP list to the client would be unsafe. In theory though, you would only ever have a few RSPS worlds so it's not really hard to obtain that information... Something in the middle would be calculating the nearest server in term of physical distance. The client would fetch its geolocalisation and send it back to the server which would find the closest server. It would not assure the ping is low, but 99% of the time it should work as long as the server isn't overloaded.

I'm probably going to go for load-based balancing anyway so I don't think I'll have to think about that.

Fair enough; I don't think it's unsafe, as in order to communicate with the server, it'll at some stage need the IP address? An adversary wanting to find your servers IP address would, given a bit of effort, be able to do so - obscurity != security.

Originally Posted by hc747

Fair enough; I don't think it's unsafe, as in order to communicate with the server, it'll at some stage need the IP address? An adversary wanting to find your servers IP address would, given a bit of effort, be able to do so - obscurity != security.

When I said it was unsafe, I was also talking about the idea of returning a list of server. If you add a new private social server to the DB and forgot to tag it "private" (or whatever I use for non-game servers), it would also return that server. Anyway, I realized the game world list (including IP and all the details) is sent when the player logs in and enters the lobby... so you are entirely right about that last statement.