*from the discussion of the "accidental" 3000 player battle in EVE*

X: I’m more interested in how it all was able to handle their cluster, did not bend, did the players feel normal?
y: There is an interesting technology used - when the cluster brakes, the game time is artificially stretched. Thus e. If before one second in the game mechanics was = 1 second in life, then there begins the stretching of time. Thus e. One game second can stretch up to 10 real and everything happens very much. Thus, the cluster has time to answer all requests, even if they are very many, at the expense of slowing down time.
z: You won’t believe, but my first PC mastered this technology on its own, somewhere in the 1990s.