chiisana

I wonder if it’s more because they’re hitting capacity limits as result of physical limitations of memory on package design — physical distance resulting in potentially unbalanced performance due to some memory simply doesn’t have physical space that could deliver consistent performance, thus limiting capacity as an idea that crossed my mind.

So less so of a “it’ll be more performant” thing, but “this was great but we have to back paddle because we need more memory than the space could permit” kind of thing?

The amount of confidently incorrect responses is exactly what one could expect from Lemmy.

First: TCP and UDP can listen on the same port, DNS is a great example of such. You’d generally need it to be part of the same process as ports are generally bound to the same process, but more on this later.

Second: Minecraft and website are both using TCP. TCP is part of layer 4, transport; whereas HTTP(S) / Minecraft are part of layer 7, application. If you really want to, you could cram HTTP(S) over UDP (technically, QUIC/HTTP3 does this), and if you absolutely want to, with updates to the protocol itself, and some server client edits you can cram Minecraft over UDP, too. People need to brush up on their OSI layers before making bold claims.

Third: The web server and the Minecraft server are not running on the same machine. For something that scale, both services are served from a cluster focused only on what they’re serving.

Finally: Hypixel use reverse proxy to sit between the user and their actual server. Specifically, they are most likely using Cloudflare Spectrum to proxy their traffic. User request reaches a point of presence, a reverse proxy service is listening on the applicable ports (443/25565) + protocol (HTTPS/Minecraft), and then depending on traffic type, and rules, the request gets routed to the actual server behind the scenes. There are speculations of them no longer using Cloudflare, but I don’t believe this is the case. If you dig their mc.hypixel.net domain, you get a bunch of direct assigned IP addresses, but if you tried to trace it from multiple locations, you’d all end up going through Cloudflare infrastructure. It is highly likely that they’re still leaning on Cloudflare for this service, with a BYOIP arrangement to reduce risk of DDOS addressed towards them overflow to other customers.

In no uncertain terms:

1. Hypixel.net has Cloudflare DNS for their domain.
2. For their website, it has orange cloud enabled to proxy traffic through CF’s global CDN and DDOS protection service.
3. For their Minecraft server, they advertise mc.hypixel.net, but also have a SRV record for _minecraft._tcp.hypixel.net set for 25565 on mc.hypixel.net
4. The mc.hypixel.net domain has CNAME record for mt.mc.production.hypixel.io. which is flattened to a bunch of their own direct assigned IP addresses.
5. Traceroute towards those direct assigned IP addresses goes through Cloudflare infrastructure but final destination is obscured, just like their website, to protect them from DDOS attacks.

The article linked to the analysis and on a quick glance, it seems to be done entirely against the Android variant of the app. This makes sense because if the alleged actions are true, they’d never have gotten on to the App Store for iOS Apple users… or at least as of a couple months ago. Who knows what kind of vulnerability is exposed by Apple only doing limited cursory checks for 3rd party App Stores.