#mesmerizedish

Mainly we just reset all of the server processes. Server processes are the things that handle tasks and behavior like chat, login, world areas, combat, spawning, guild banks, mail, and the like. Resetting the processes clears out any fragmentation that may have occurred in the server’s memory, and it clears out any zombie processes that died during the week and needed to be restarted. Our automated scripts then process most of the week’s data (e.g. parsing and generating reports from the telemetry captured). Logs of what happened that week are flushed to disk. Data and databases are backed up. Then we restart the game processes, re-initializing timers for quests, rare spawns, weekly events, raid bosses, and so on.

During some (but not all) maintenance sessions, we will apply non-emergency patches to the server in order to update it with new code. Usually this entails bug fixes, optimizations, and support for new or upcoming features. It isn’t uncommon for us to update the live servers with bits and pieces of expansion code and systems before launch and simply lock it off until the client update goes live. Sometimes we also use maintenance to swap out or upgrade hardware. Sometimes we use the time to run scripts to do a variety of tasks, like clean up old accounts or handle server merges. Sometimes we will migrate data from one machine to another, or we’ll replace/upgrade old hardware with new machines. Given how much data MMOGs generate, we tend to run through a lot of hard drives.

Maintenance is really pretty boring. Most of it is automated and handled by tasks scheduled on the servers themselves. There’s also usually 1-2 live ops and/or server team engineers rotating to oversee it each week to make sure nothing really catastrophic happens while it goes on. Overall, though, that’s about it.

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Fun fact: by the time he acted in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Keanu Reeves was already AT LEAST 147 years old! Strange, but true!

why's it always about age w you? huh?

have you figured out how to make it stop D:

Not really. I had to disable Adblock then manually stop each video. And while the "About Tumblr ads" page says you should be able to report ads you hate to Yahoo by clicking the X on the top of the video, these don't have Xes! (covered by the "some of our ads do not currently have this capability") clause.

you’re not the only one, someone else on my dash is posting about it too

Don’t fuck the bear, that’s dangerous!

how small is farris? they always seem so big.

HAH

10 Things was ‘99, so there’s PRECEDENT. There’s still hope.