The success of a game is no accident. The team of Honor of Kings has made great efforts to keep the game challenging, appealing, and full of various elements. Dozens of systems are developed, such as the combat system, player system, and inscription system. At present, the game has generated hundreds of terabytes of data in the background database, and each region holds more than 100 tables that are still growing, leading to higher requirements for database performance, stability, scalability, and costs in supporting game-specific scenarios.
Database is essential for games like Honor of Kings as it stores the data of all systems of a game. For years, the core data of Honor of Kings has been maintained in TcaplusDB, a distributed NoSQL database service developed by Tencent Cloud for games.
TcaplusDB supports near-limitless horizontal scalability. The shard-based distribution technology enables it to contain 2.56 petabytes of data in a single table and the throughput grows linearly with the hardware capacity. TcaplusDB also supports fast/slow request separation and record lock, which allows it to isolate complex requests from simple ones, and reduce the lock scope to improve the read and write efficiency. By using innovative algorithms, TcaplusDB exchanges hot and cold data in the same process, which prevents issues such as data inconsistency, service unavailability, and complex management due to cross-process data exchange.
From the perspective of game business scenarios, TcaplusDB supports the lifecycle management of game data at the table level and record level. This allows it to effectively clear expired tables or records. By using cold backups and binary logs, TcaplusDB can roll back a server, a table, a record, or the specified data to a point in time accurate to milliseconds.
Facing the massive and increasing number of users, the team of Honor of Kings has never slackened its grasp on system stability and scalability.
Taking overload protection as an example, TcaplusDB detects service overload based on the performance of game servers, and comprehensively evaluates the database workload by monitoring metrics such as processing latency, queue length, and success rate to protect high-load applications and prevent database crash.
TcaplusDB provides different solutions for planned and unplanned scaling events, which allows the team to respond flexibly. When a zone or server fails, TcaplusDB automatically switches the service to another zone and fix the fault. This not only guarantees fast and efficient scaling, but also causes zero impact on the gaming experience.
Tencent Cloud TcaplusDB is the world's first database service that has successfully supported a game with over 100 million daily active users.
As the market of mobile games, typically Honor of Kings, evolves to a new stage, TencentDB will keep pumping resources into the game industry to enrich the product ecosystem, and continuously improve its comprehensive service capability to help drive the healthy growth of the mobile game market.