Player Cap

I assume as a web developer that Warmane carry out optimisations and lower the server load at capacity, then figure it's safe to raise the cap a little.

My question is what kind of optimisations are made in order to increase the player cap so significantly? Seeing as the original cap was less than 7000 players, I find it crazy that now it's close to or even surpassed double the original capacity. From the dev logs it seems to be mostly software related optimizations rather than updating hardware, at least in the beginning.

My field of work and experience is much less advanced, so looking for technical insight.

Well , dev team is searious and skilled .
Hardware probably didn't change since 7000 cap , so its all code optimization.
In theory there is no limit to how much you can optimize, especialy on newer hardware.

Cap didn't just double , it slowly increased over time , I myself keept my eye on things, every cap increase was followed by increase in avg latency which would over time get reduced(by optimizations) to around 70~ms at that point they would increase cap by 1k, repated cycle until they reached stable 12k. If you understand what I'm saying.

Edit: avg latency during previous week on 12k was 120ms , today it suddenly dropped to 95-105ms , so that's probably new wave of optimizations , could be wrong though.

Yeah I hear you. It's pretty interesting about the latency going up after a cap increase then slowly down. What I'm wondering though is what exactly entails 'optimization', I know it must be a hell of a lot of different things, but what are those things?
Is it lowering database requests or special kinds of caching or wut? I think it's probably too complex for our feeble minds to comprehend. Or to list in a post. I was kind of hoping the development log would be more technical but then maybe nobody would read it.