Server Maintenance

tilvios <toxaristhrasoe RemoveThis @yahoo.com> wrote:
> WoW reserves a maintenance downtime slot once a week. Why does CoH/CoV
> have to reserve a spot every morning? I remember being irritated by
> this when I was playing last year before giving WoW a try. I'd think
> the load is significantly higher on the WoW servers.

You do *not* want to hold Blizzard's maintenance practices up as a way
Cryptic should do things. Trust me, I have 3 level 60s in WoW, and 15-20
minutes of daily maintenance is infinitely preferable to basically having
the servers down for one day a week.

Yes, Blizzard's gotten better over the past month or so. But a few
patches ago, they were horrible.
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Marcel Beaudoin wrote:
> "tilvios" <toxaristhrasoe RemoveThis @yahoo.com> wrote in news:1149771884.670534.99960
> @f6g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
>
>> WoW reserves a maintenance downtime slot once a week. Why does CoH/CoV
>> have to reserve a spot every morning? I remember being irritated by
>> this when I was playing last year before giving WoW a try. I'd think
>> the load is significantly higher on the WoW servers.
>
> Cryptic reserves 2 hours each weekday morning to do thier server
> maintenance. Very rarely does it take the entire two hours. Often, from
> what I have read on the official forums, they are in the time period 30-45
> minutes.

It's also worth pointing out that sometimes they don't need to take the
servers offline at ALL-- I've played straight through the scheduled
maintenance periods and not even noticed.
--
[The address listed is a spam trap. To reply, take off every zig.]
Richard Clayton
"During wars laws are silent." -- Cicero
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Richard Clayton wrote:
> Marcel Beaudoin wrote:
> > "tilvios" <toxaristhrasoe.RemoveThis@yahoo.com> wrote in news:1149771884.670534.99960
> > @f6g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
> >
> >> WoW reserves a maintenance downtime slot once a week. Why does CoH/CoV
> >> have to reserve a spot every morning? I remember being irritated by
> >> this when I was playing last year before giving WoW a try. I'd think
> >> the load is significantly higher on the WoW servers.
> >
> > Cryptic reserves 2 hours each weekday morning to do thier server
> > maintenance. Very rarely does it take the entire two hours. Often, from
> > what I have read on the official forums, they are in the time period 30-45
> > minutes.
>
> It's also worth pointing out that sometimes they don't need to take the
> servers offline at ALL-- I've played straight through the scheduled
> maintenance periods and not even noticed.

This makes 3 mornings in a row. The downtimes might be short, but they
just happen to coincide with the time I'd like to play in the morning
before heading out to work. I'd hope in the year that I was gone,
they'd figured out how to avoid daily maintenance. At work I have
servers that run for months at a time and only go down to apply
security related patches. It seems to me Cryptic could schedule what
they have to do every week. *shrug*
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Marcel Beaudoin wrote:
>
> Unless you are running a MMORPG, then I highly doubt your servers at work
> are under the same type of stresses as Cryptic's servers.

But what are these stresses exactly that require the servers or
services (deamons) to be bounced everyday? Memory leaks? Unclosed
connections? Misbehaving database transactions?

I wasn't saying I ran as intensive of applications as an MMO, but my
point is that software that is stable and relatively free of bugs
shouldn't be gobbling up resources no matter how intensive. I can't
imagine what they need to bounce the service every day.
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Brian Trosko wrote:
> tilvios <toxaristhrasoe.DeleteThis@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > WoW reserves a maintenance downtime slot once a week. Why does CoH/CoV
> > have to reserve a spot every morning? I remember being irritated by
> > this when I was playing last year before giving WoW a try. I'd think
> > the load is significantly higher on the WoW servers.
>
> You do *not* want to hold Blizzard's maintenance practices up as a way
> Cryptic should do things. Trust me, I have 3 level 60s in WoW, and 15-20
> minutes of daily maintenance is infinitely preferable to basically having
> the servers down for one day a week.
>
> Yes, Blizzard's gotten better over the past month or so. But a few
> patches ago, they were horrible.

When I was playing WoW (I quit in February), it was rare that downtimes
were extended. They had problems sometimes of course, which tend to
stick to the memory more than the usual which was to come up on time.
Also problems with WoW servers are exaserbated by the sheer numbers
trying to login. But I was able to log on and play most days when I
wanted to, which isn't true of CoH/CoV where there seems to be daily
chunk of time that the service is down.
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On 2006-06-09, tilvios <toxaristhrasoe.TakeThisOut@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'd hope in the year that I was gone,
> they'd figured out how to avoid daily maintenance.

Uhm...

--
--- An' thou dost not get caught, do as thou wilt shall be the law ---
"Religion disperses like a fog, kingdoms perish, but the works of
scholars remain for an eternity." - Ulughbek
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Richard Clayton wrote:
> Nothing in the computer industry is EVER bug free. Period. Software
> advertised as "bug free" really means "We didn't test it long enough to
> discover any of the bugs."

I wouldn't go that far. If it were true, computers would be of little
to no use. For example if I couldn't count on a database engine to
parse SQL and return the expected result set based on the data without
bugs, it would be worthless.
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Marcel Beaudoin wrote:
> "tilvios" <toxaristhrasoe.DeleteThis@yahoo.com> wrote in
> news:1149865052.570373.7190@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com:
>
>> Marcel Beaudoin wrote:
>>> Unless you are running a MMORPG, then I highly doubt your servers at
>>> work are under the same type of stresses as Cryptic's servers.
>> But what are these stresses exactly that require the servers or
>> services (deamons) to be bounced everyday? Memory leaks? Unclosed
>> connections? Misbehaving database transactions?
>>
>> I wasn't saying I ran as intensive of applications as an MMO, but my
>> point is that software that is stable and relatively free of bugs
>> shouldn't be gobbling up resources no matter how intensive. I can't
>> imagine what they need to bounce the service every day.
>
> First, remember that they just released Issue 7. For the next several
> weeks, expect the maintenance window to be used every day as they push
> patcjhes and hotfixes at us.
>
> Second, remember that people abuse the servers a lot. People get
> disonnected by their ISPs, routers, computers and Cryptics servers, none of
> which are designed to make server maintenance people happy dreams.
>
> Third, remember that MMOs are *never* bug free.

Nothing in the computer industry is EVER bug free. Period. Software
advertised as "bug free" really means "We didn't test it long enough to
discover any of the bugs."
--
[The address listed is a spam trap. To reply, take off every zig.]
Richard Clayton
"During wars laws are silent." -- Cicero
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tilvios wrote:
> Richard Clayton wrote:
>> Nothing in the computer industry is EVER bug free. Period. Software
>> advertised as "bug free" really means "We didn't test it long enough to
>> discover any of the bugs."
>
> I wouldn't go that far. If it were true, computers would be of little
> to no use. For example if I couldn't count on a database engine to
> parse SQL and return the expected result set based on the data without
> bugs, it would be worthless.

That does not follow from my comment. There is a vast gulf between
"this program exhibits occasional unexpected behavior" and "this program
exhibits constant and totally unpredictable unexpected behavior."
--
[The address listed is a spam trap. To reply, take off every zig.]
Richard Clayton
"During wars laws are silent." -- Cicero
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Richard Clayton wrote:
> tilvios wrote:
> > Richard Clayton wrote:
> >> Nothing in the computer industry is EVER bug free. Period. Software
> >> advertised as "bug free" really means "We didn't test it long enough to
> >> discover any of the bugs."
> >
> > I wouldn't go that far. If it were true, computers would be of little
> > to no use. For example if I couldn't count on a database engine to
> > parse SQL and return the expected result set based on the data without
> > bugs, it would be worthless.
>
> That does not follow from my comment. There is a vast gulf between
> "this program exhibits occasional unexpected behavior" and "this program
> exhibits constant and totally unpredictable unexpected behavior."


Your comment was "nothing in the computer industry is EVER bug free."
That statement is far different than saying there is some portion of
any complex program that may act in an unexpected fashion for given
variables. Simple programs of course can be totally bug free and
operate for years without problem.
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Richard Clayton wrote:

>
> A bug is unexpected behavior. For a program to be truly and completely
> bug free, it must NEVER exhibit unexpected behavior, under any
> circumstances whatsoever.
> This doesn't happen.


A couple of examples of bug free programs that will never do anything
unexpected:

perl -e "print 4*5"

This program will always print 20. Find the bug in it.

Another one:

select count(*) from customers where active_flag = 'Y'

This SQL program will always return the count of active customers,
without fail or bug.

If you couldn't count on simple programs to return dependable results
without bugs, computers wouldn't have any business use.

Unless you consider out of resource conditions or harware failures to
be software bugs, these are totally bug free programs.
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Mr. Bad Example wrote:
> In article <1149959417.920708.262300.RemoveThis@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
> toxaristhrasoe.RemoveThis@yahoo.com says...
>
> > perl -e "print 4*5"
> >
> > This program will always print 20. Find the bug in it.
>
> One successful trivial case does not a bug-free program make.
>

The trivial case was a bug-free program. I'm not sure I understand
your point. I wasn't saying Perl was bug free, I was saying my program
written in Perl is bug free.
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In article <1149959417.920708.262300.DeleteThis@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
toxaristhrasoe.DeleteThis@yahoo.com says...

> perl -e "print 4*5"
>
> This program will always print 20. Find the bug in it.

One successful trivial case does not a bug-free program make.

--
"I'm sorry, did I offend you just now? Pardon me--I'm
sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. Really, I'm sorry,
I didn't mean to offend you. Should I like, change my
attitude? Should I change my whole way of being? Huh?
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. BITE ME HARD!"
--Jim's Big Ego
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