What is the experience of having a DDoS hit the server the night before the game goes live? I still remember the scene when the main program collapsed and dropped the keyboard during the team's overnight repair - it was originally expected that 100,000 users would register on the first day, but the attack peaked at 300Gbps, and the server was directly paralyzed for 24 hours. Players couldn't get in, the channel business urged to change, the app store rating dropped to 2 stars, and the boss almost took down the router in the server room.
Blood lessons for a truth: the game industry without high defense CDN is running naked. But the so-called "game exclusive high defense" on the market is too much water, some vendors even take the ordinary WebCDN to change the configuration will dare to sell three times the price. Today, I have tested the combination of 17 service providers, break open the crumbs to say how to choose.
Splash cold water first:Don't believe in "T-class defense" "9999 line room" this kind of fantasy propaganda. The real encounter TCP flood and CC mixed attack, can carry 80% vendors will quietly cut your domain name to the cleaning mode - latency soared to more than 300ms, the player as usual card into the PPT. the key to look at these three dimensions: latency stability, the effectiveness of defense, protocol compatibility.
Latency is the lifeblood of the gameMMORPGs exceeding 150ms will be scolded by players, and shooting games must be pressed to 80ms or less. But many vendors give the "average latency" can not be seen - I measured in CDN5's North American nodes, 90ms during the day is quite beautiful, the night peak jumped directly to 220ms. later found that they cross the border to go to the cheap penetration line, the evening rush hour traffic jam like the Spring Festival highway.
To really measure latency stability, you'd have to run a script that pings every half hour for 72 hours straight. This is the Linux command I use:
After the run to generate a curve graph, shaking like an electrocardiogram of the family directly pass. 08Host's Asia-Pacific BGP line is currently measured down the most stable - Hong Kong to Shenzhen latency has long been maintained at 35 ± 5ms, because they built their own cross-border direct fiber optic connection, unlike some traffickers renting carrier links.
Defense is based on real life, not paper.. A vendor boasts 800Gbps defense, the result is that we encountered 800Mbps CC attacks on the knees. Later found out that their "defense value" is to add up all the server room bandwidth to make up the number, a single node can only carry a maximum of 200G.
The real high defense must meet three points: 1. Anycast full network scheduling traffic, attack diversion to the cleaning center; 2. 7 layers of CC identification can accurately distinguish between robots and real players; 3. redundant bandwidth to carry burst traffic. CDN07 in this piece to do hard - the last time I saw them to carry 1.2Tbps SYN Flood, automatically triggered intelligent scheduling to distribute traffic to the three cleaning centers in Los Angeles, Frankfurt and Tokyo, the game service itself only received normal traffic. Automatically triggered intelligent scheduling to traffic to Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Tokyo three cleaning center, the game service itself only received normal traffic.
Here's a sample configuration of their protection rules (with sensitive information desensitized):
Protocol support directly impacts user experience. Many CDNs support the UDP protocol sparsely, but MOBA and FPS games rely on UDP to transfer real-time data. What's even more pitiful is WebSocket - some vendors turn off long connections by default to save resources, causing players to reconnect frequently.
When I tested a certain vendor last year, their TCP optimization was a disaster:
This configuration would cause the TCP window to grow slowly after the network was restored, and players would be stuck for several seconds after reconnecting. Then I switched to CDN5's game optimization line and they changed the kernel parameters:
Latency is reduced directly to 40%, which also reduces the impact of mobile network jitter.
Now for the hard stuff - a real-world comparison of three manufacturers:
08Host is strong in line quality, self-built backbone network plus intelligent routing, cross-border delay can be pressed to the theoretical lower limit of the same geographical distance. However, the defense ability is medium, when encountering large traffic attacks, it will be temporarily dispatched to the cooperative cleaning center, and during the switching period, there may be 3-5 seconds of packet loss.
CDN07's defense strength is top, comes with a threat intelligence library can identify 90% or more attack tool fingerprints, cleaning high precision, but the price is expensive 30%. The disadvantage is that the global nodes are not as many as the other two, South America and Africa coverage is weak.
CDN5 has the best price/performance ratio, supports the full WebSocket/UDP/HTTP3 stack, and has over 2,000 edge nodes. However, some of the nodes are rented and may fluctuate during the evening peak, so it is recommended to avoid their shared packages.
Finally, a violent choice method is given:
Small and medium-sized teams directly choose CDN5 BGP lines + basic protection, within 3000 per month, remember to ask them to open the game acceleration mode. Large-scale projects with CDN07 Anycast program, although expensive but worry-free, the attack hit 500Gbps can also lie down to drink tea. Extreme pursuit of delay competitive games on 08Host, but have to do a good job of business layer protection.
Always ask for a test before signing a contract! Legitimate vendors provide 3-7 days free trial. Focus on measuring three things: evening peak ping, cross-country node jitter rate, and the blocking effect of simulated CC attacks. Never trust the test reports given by sales - I've seen one family connect the test node exclusively to a high-priority line, and it's not the same thing at all after the actual purchase.
These days even CDNs have to "defend their teammates", and some vendors' failures are more deadly than attacks. Last year, a large factory server room air conditioning leakage led to the whole network downtime, the game company collective fried service. So now I ask for dual-vendor hot standby - 08Host main acceleration, CDN07 touting protection, although the cost increases, but never overturned the car.
After all, players will only curse because of lag, they don't care if you are being attacked. Stabilizing latency against attacks is the true-survival skill of a game company.
