Shard Reboots

[habiff]

What would be REALLY cool, is if the main website included a timer displaying the countdown to the point when the shard reboots have completed, and we can safely log in again.

[jwenting]

Nice in theory, but such things aren't always predictable.

Like your home computer, which sometimes takes a 2 minutes to boot and other times seems to drag on forever, so it is with servers.
If they're installing patches or upgrades (not just for the Ryzom software but OS stuff) it's even harder to estimate.

And there's always people who'd complain if the reboot took longer than announced, some might even make fools of themselves and write bad reviews about "the Ryzom devs lied when they said the reboot would take 15 minutes but it took 20!".

[ajsuk]

Reboots usually take place every Monday morning around 3 or 4am GMT, and normally complete in less than an hour. (points at tool in my sig below \/)

However, as lightening said, patches or unscheduled reboots are unpredictable by nature...

[vim79]

Server info here as well

[habiff]

Enterprise datacenters have regular maintenance windows, with timing guarantees. Therefore I have no doubt that a counter could be created, timing the window for ryzom.

During the window, no guarantees. Outside of the window, standard SLA applies.

Expectations and bad reviews could be mitigated by announcing the maintenance windows, and ensuring the length of the window is twice as long as the installation, and rollback of any applied changes (essentially four times the needed time). This means testing in dev or release candidate environments prior to production launch, to understand the necessary time required to implement and back out any change.

[ajsuk]

umm... ya... or we can just put up with the usual 0.5, maybe 1% of downtime a week which is such a hindrance to our lives...

Not like we have to queue to get in is it.

[kalindra]

Hey there ! We are very lucky compared to people who play a game that has daily downtime every morning. And ours rarely last more than 15-20 minutes. It's generally a good time to log on the CeB chat client, go grab a drink or a snack, take a shower, start some laundry, go walk the dog, feed your sister's annoying attention hoe of a cat before she drives you nuts... OK, you might need heroic superspeed in order to do ALL of that within our regular downtime but they were just a few examples of why it's not so dramatic to lose 15-20 minutes of gametime a week...

[jwenting]

What might be a good idea is to have the serverstatus displayed prominently on the main ryzom.com website with reason for downtime, so newcomers know the server is down for regular maintenance when it is.
Might prevent one or two of them from thinking the stories about Ryzom being down that still linger on the main gaming websites are correct.