Fallback when Photon machine broken?

The EU region was recently down during a critical time for us, and support told me that it was due to one machine's hardware failure. That machine hardware's has since been fixed, but my question is, for future reliability is there any plan we can subscribe to where we would get fail redundancy with a second machine for such cases? Single Points of Failures are always a bit unsettling. Or should we consider adding code on our end that tries to detect outages and then switch to the US region (for another $99/month, I guess). Thanks!

Comments

  • Hi @Philipp,

    any pricing plan includes the use of all available regions, however you are still limited to the CCUs you have ordered. There is no additional payment required so far. Example from PUN's pricing page:

    Sample Month: EU peak 420 CCU, US peak 230 CCU, Other regions 0 CCU — CCU total = 420 + 230 = 650, matching 1000 CCU plan.


    If you currently forcing a connection to the EU MasterServer, you can also implement the void OnFailedToConnectToPhoton(DisconnectCause cause) callback to see if the connection is not working. In this case you can try to connect to another Region MasterServer.
  • Christian, many thanks!

    To better understand, if we had a plan that included all available regions, would we still need to set up separate app ids and manage them on our end (e.g. using OnFailed...) or would that then be fallback-managed behind the scenes if one region has issues? Thanks!
  • No, you don't have to set up different AppIDs. I guess this also won't work at all, because your paid plan is bound to one AppID. All newly created AppIDs are either free (20 CCU limit) or you have to add another paid subscription to them.
  • Thank you. If we were to switch to Enterprise servers, would we need to specify a region? We really have people from all over the world (in our VR universe Anyland).
  • If you have players all around the world, you can also use PUN's Best Region functionality. Instead of using a certain Region MasterServer, a client would ping all available regions (you can select which regions those are on the Dashboard) and connects to the region with the best ping.

    I don't think that there is a difference between the Public and the Enterprise Cloud in terms of available or limited regions, but if you want to have clarification about this, it's best to send a mail to developer@photonengine.com.
  • > Instead of using a certain Region MasterServer, a client would ping all available regions

    Ah ok many thanks. We are actually a persistent "single server appearance" MMO, so people from all over the world at the same time also all chat with each other (split into locations which can be easily teleported to at any time, fluently). Would Best Region functionality be compatible with that? I guess not but maybe...?
  • Would Best Region functionality be compatible with that?


    No, Best Region connects players to regions where they have the lowest latency to. A player from Europe for example will most likely join the EU region, whereat a player from the USA will connect to either the US or the USW region, depends on his location. So this functionality would be counterproductive to what you have.
  • Thank you for this great & speedy support!
    From your experience, does it deeply matter to US users if they are still (as it is now) having to connect to the EU region? We are using chat & realtime (VR) body movement (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU-KXANTLiw for live example). We didn't have any noticable issues chatting with US users so far (we're from the EU), though recently were told by one group in the US that they have regular voice dropouts (which I suspect may be something different, e.g. mic settings).
  • If low latency is not a top priority for you and you haven't had any negative feedback about the latency, I think you are fine by using just one region (EU in your case). Low latency is mostly important for competitive games like Counter-Strike for example.

    About the dropouts in Voice: if those are not related to the player's microphone, please let us know.
  • JohnTube
    JohnTube ✭✭✭✭✭
    Hi @Philipp,

    I just wanted to add that Regions Dashboard Filtering combined with Best Region feature may be helpful to enable or disable one or more regions on the fly for whatever reason.
  • Thanks Christian & John!