The folks at CCP have posted anew devblog which introduces players to the EVE Performance Group, and what they do behind the scenes to make EVE Online run smoothly.

If you've been reading recent dev blogs then you'll already know about EVE64 and StacklessIO. You may also already know about the current hardware upgrades in progress for TQ. What you may not know is that we've got a dedicated group of people whose entire purpose is all about making EVE run better, faster, and smarter. Working under the "Need for Speed" effort that's been ongoing since late 2006; we strive to improve the performance of the EVE cluster and clients as much as we can.

Where to begin?

A big part of what we do involves research and investigation. Quite often in order to find the best way to fix a problem you need to fully understand the problem and all the factors that contribute to it. This takes time, patience, and usually a lot of reading of code and specialized testing.

We started by using data from previous investigations and then building upon that with more monitoring, profiling, and debugging tools to help us identify points where we could get the greatest performance gain or where we could reduce load the most.

Read more here.