Game image roll-up frequency

Note: The content on this page pertains to Managed Game Server Hosting (Clanforge). If you’re using Game Server Hosting (Multiplay), refer to the Game Server Hosting (Multiplay) documentation.

The frequency at which you should roll-up your game image (in other words, release a full image update) varies based on your unique requirements. You should consider how much disk space you have on your machines, the size of your game image, and how often you scale into the cloud.

The recommended best practice is that you release full image versions during every image update, reserving differential updates for time-sensitive hotfixes and other urgent updates. When machines are first provisioned in bare metal or cloud, they begin by downloading the most recent full image and then proceed to download all newer differential updates. Therefore, each additional differential update on top of a full image causes machine boot times and initial network bandwidth consumption to increase.

ProsCons
Differential updateRolls out faster to bare metal machines in your fleet plus sign
  • Increases the overall size of the game image minus sign
  • Increases the time it takes to initialize cloud instances minus sign
Full image update
  • Decreases the overall size of the game image plus sign
  • Decreases the time it takes to initialize cloud instances plus sign
Rolls out slower minus sign