TBC: Extended Maintenance on Tuesday night.

[Henhouse]

We have scheduled a major extended maintenance for Tuesday starting around 11PM EST, (Wed. 05:00 Server time). During this we will be performing backups, entire server restarts, character cleanups & as well as performing a prune.

What is a prune? We've only done 2 in the past and we do 1-2 each year (last one was June 17th, 2010). What we do is wipe 8+ months inactive accounts. Yes, delete them completely. So if you have not logged into an account in 8 months, do so to insure that it does not get removed. This applies to any account, donor, or non-donor. It is not by character either, so you only need to login to the account to insure the entire account is safe.

The purpose of these prunes are very essential to the health of the server. When we ban player's accounts for example, their data is never removed. It sits there taking up space -- so does all the players that never come back. 8 months we feel is plenty of time for a user to have returned to insure his/her account is not deleted.

[Blackmambaa]

What is the estimated time the server will be back up?

[Henhouse]

We're about 80-85% percent complete so *maybe* within an hour? Don't count on it, I haven't run the optimize command on our database in over a year so I have no idea what to even guess for the length of that.

I have to dump the database one more time once this prune finishes which it's on the last big query right now so once that is finished I'll do an entire server restart, then optimize, then dumb. Then bring server back up.

So it really just depends.

[Henhouse]

We apologize since it was very much "extended." Shows how long it's been since I performed one of these. I should do them ever several months instead of annually to make it go faster...