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World of Warcraft Outage Charted
miller60 writes "World of Warcraft has had extended downtime in the past 24 hours, apparently due to problems with a content patch installation. Blizzard's first MMORPG had recurrent downtime problems in January. The performance problems haven't slowed the frantic growth for WoW, which now has more than 1.5 million subscribers (which, as the article notes, works out to at least $26,000 an hour in assumed revenue)."
As I type this, servers were taken down for a patch install about 40 hours ago. I'm told some came back up 5-8 hours after going down only to have major disconnection issues for a huge proportion of the population. Some servers were not brought up while attempts were made to fix the problem. It was roughly 17 hours after the initial take-down that I was finally about to log onto Proudmoore. I personally had limited opportunity to do anything at that time. Some further 4-5 hours after that (almost at the 24 hours mark) Proudmoore went down hard again. I was past the "realm not found" point, but I hadn't acutally loaded the world. I had a social event for the next few hours, but it did seem to be back up at about the 26 hour mark. This was getting late local time so I went to bed. This morning (34-36 hour mark) I again had problems getting on, with large delays at the "Authenticating" point of login. This can mean that the realm is up but the login server is down. As far as I know it's been up for the last few hours.
The latest patch seems to have caused major technical problems for some users. In addition, login server problems have amplified problems with disconnects and crashes -- meaning that if the game locks up on you, you might not be able to log back in for a couple of hours. That said, my SLI rig appears to be more stable, not less.
Between personal committments and downtime I think I've spent about 4 hours in game in the last 48.
Your information is out of date. The following transfers are currenty allowed:
Warsongers have been trashing my home server of Bonechewer for many days now. Trust me, transfers are active.
I guess your server isn't on the list, though. Sorry.
for the major downtimes, even on specific servers. I think so far, I had six total days credited since the first week of the game release. Also, they give you XP bonus in case you got disconnected outoside of the inn/city.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
What's preventing this?
Fundamental server design?
A distributed network of game servers is easy enough, but one where game state shifts instantly and seamlessly from machine to machine "at need"? If the server "needed" to move part of the game world somewhere else, it wouldn't have the free time to wrap it up and transmit it to another machine, which in turn wouldn't have the free time to open up its new world, get the memory sorted out, oh, and all this time keep serving the content as its being transferred. Plus the whole seamless transfer of the internet connections, which would be damn hard as well, even with some kind of front end redirection, it'd have to be notified when the data/connection transfer was in progress and completed.
They do. Based on the many crashes on Kil' Jaden, heres what I gather are the there is a master server which handles global/guild chat, auction, and mail functions. Then there is a server for each of the two continents. Before there was a bug with boats that would cause the Eastern Continent to reset constantly however those in the West were unaffected. Instance Servers. There are likely many servers which host private instanced dungeons for groups, and these probably get scaled with population and popularity. Also based on observation and what other players have said there is at least one separate server for loot drops, which is what causes "loot lag" where a player gets stuck in the looting position while the server is queried.