More Servers?

So, I was farting around clicking random stuff here when I found out that there are now four (new?) servers called App5-8 respectively. Does this mean less lag and loading bubbles of death? Or do I not understand how latency works?

I think you aren't the first one to find out.... I think chedburn announced it somewhere. I didn't bother to check anything because it doesn't feel any faster or slower.

Depends on how the load balancing is set up. Hopefully they have server-side load balancers in high-availability pairs. A single balancer becomes a potential single point of failure.

Without something in place to efficiently and reliably manage the traffic, they could have a hundred servers and you're still going to get lag if 90% of the users at any one time are on one server.

They must have all that sorted or performance would be much worse than it is. The biggest problem seems to be around UTC midnight or shortly after, possibly due to a daily backup job running. Since there's no down time, backup and maintenance has to be done while the servers are active.

I'm sure they're running a server monitoring tool and know exactly where/when the bottlenecks have occurred, and probably why they occurred too. For what is essentially a free-to-play, ads-free game, I think the server performance is quite good overall.

Okay that makes perfect sense. Thanks for explaining! Another question would be that if they are indeed balancing the player load well, would we see a noticeable decrease in loading times just because they increased the number of servers?

load = burden, not loading time. so another way to say it is burden-balancing.

If they increase the number of servers, and balance the load (burden) efficiently, and do not increase the burden by increasing number of users, or by increasing complexity of code (i.e. territories), or by increasing the number of utilities running or frequency of them being run....

It's a bit more complex than "more servers = better performance", even if they're balanced. For decades now, production environments have been measured by % downtime (or % of time server capacity is exceeded) to quantify the quality of performance. In ANY system, there is some acceptable % of lag time, probably a bit more in a game than in an air-traffic control system or a hospital ICU, lol. So adding servers may not be aimed so much at improving performance as in maintaining current performance as the overall load grows for any number of reasons (enhancements, more users, better monitoring, improved security, etc.) I'm probably missing half of the factors involved, you'd need to pull in a systems programmer or systems architect for a complete answer.