Game workloads exhibit unpredictable long-term fluctuations

While the daily and weekly cycles in server load are clear, the duration of our trace allows us to examine longer term cycles. We examine the trend of three games of similar popularity as well as the trend of the most popular game, Half-life, over the period of just over two years. We compute the trend as the moving average of the data with a window size of one week. Figure 10 shows the trends of the respective games. The underlying trend of these games does not reveal periodicities on a monthly timescale, and the limits of our trace prevent us from drawing any strong conclusions about annual cycles. There are several points in trace where the games appear to be synchronized, but the explanation for the concurrent peaks or valleys is not necessarily predictable. We observe peaks in all games near the Christmas season, but, for example, all four games experience a drop during the unpredictable weeks of the Sobig virus [27].