DCs

[Flockaveli]

Okay I'm on the verge of major nerd rage.
The servers up for like 10 minutes then down for half hour...
Repeat...
Like 5 times?
Fix.
NOAW.

[Henhouse]

Please calm down, nothing irritates me more than players who play on a free server and expect everything to work perfect like a multi-billion dollar funded game. Believe it or not, things go wrong sometimes and work is required to be done. The server appears to be having a lot of issues, not just today, but entirely for several weeks now. I've been wanting to do an extended maintenance to do a full recalibration of the entire server, but such a task takes possibly 10 hours on estimate. Since that amount of downtime is not particularly fond of in the interests of the players we've been trying to find a reasonable time to do it, or have a temporary server up in the meantime--which cannot be done unless we have two servers at the moment, we do not.

I've taken the entire server down now and will begin emergency maintenance. This will include purging of deleted characters and an entire dump and reimport of the character database ALONG WITH a well overdue PRUNE of 9+ month inactive accounts. MySQL is not really perfectly for high-demanded tasks and non-optimized servers. Unfortunately, 2.4.3 was never fully optimized and these cores were built on MySQL since it's of course free. So sometimes optimization and cleans ups are needed. I've waited far to long to do this and it's in desperate need of the server. We have well around 450,000 characters currently stored in our database. Each character has several hundred entries of spells, items, friends, quest statses, etc. We have millions upon millions upon million of entries in the database. After a while it gets too hard for any server to perform well under those circumstances.

Clearing out everything inactive, unneeded and unused and reimporting which will allow re-aligning by the MySQL server will make things, I believe, to be a lot faster. This is the only thing I can see that has caused hindrance of server performance lately and I hope that this will resolve all issues.


Purging 10+ month inactive accounts lets us also get rid of banned accounts that are ancient too. I will estimate 150,000 - 200,000 characters will be deleted which will help the server, very, very much.

However, this removal will take a very, very long time to perform. Imagine having to sort through many millions of entries finding specific ones to remove? Yeah, it's going to take many hours to compute this, but I'll begin now and see where I'll get to.

[Flockaveli]

I appreciate the response, thanks for taking the time.
I was half sarcastic about the nerd rage, though I am very bored.
Fair enough to people who don't pay to play...
But some of us do, I know it's not "paying" it's donating...
But eh, good luck, would love it if you could keep us updated with the work.
Pce.

[Henhouse]

I'll try to keep you all updated as best I can. Character backup has now been completed and I am about to begin purging of accounts.

Wow, 35,611 accounts pruned!

[Henhouse]

Roughly 227,000 characters are being deleted that were banned, inactive or previously deleted. This will take a few hours. Once that is finished, database will be dumped, deleted and then reimported into a newly created database from the dump which will take 4-8 hours. Time is unknown and estimates based on previous pruned done in the past.

[Ethug]

amagawd i wanna play!
let me play! i dont wanna sleep :(

[Minagi]

Anyway Thank you Henhouse your job. We are waiting for you, and we have time, so easy. And Thank you again! ^.^

[Cantkeep]

Yes, thank you Henhouse. I am extremely impressed by you taking the time to work on the server in it's time of need.

I wouldn't stress any loss in player base either, take all the time you need for a fix that will last. I think we lose more new players when they log on during peak hours and experience lag then we will ever lose because the servers went down for maintenance.. any rage presented because of maintenance only reassures the players will be frequently checking for up-time and playing again asap.

Great job, great display of initiative.

[Henhouse]

Thanks for your comments guys, it's really nice to hear.
Downtime and maintenance usually mean the following: constant bitching. 0 donations.


Imagine doing your job, the most critical part of your job where stuff is messed up and you're the only one who can fix it and people are freaking out, constantly messaging you, some bitching and you get nothing for it. Kinda sucky ain't it? :P

Funny true story I got the server online and had like 10 minutes to finish my homework for Law class, I finished it and made it to class right on time. It was... amazing.

[Adama]

Cheers and grtulations HenHouse!! It's realy amazing ^^
And thank you again (from Minagi too:)