What takes Blizz so long on Maintenance Tuesday?

B

Bob002

Gawd
Joined
Jul 22, 2004
Messages
884
And why can't they start in the middle of the night instead of early in the morning?

Seriously. What do they do that takes 6 hours? I guess defrag maybe? Surely there has to be a way to do things that they could take part of the realm down one at a time, rather than having one big massive outage?
 
I've always wondered about this. IMO, it's ridiculous that it can't be done in the early, early morning hours. I either do my errands on Tuesday mornings or just stay up late Monday night playing and sleep till maintenance is over on Tuesday. FFXI never had these maintenance problems AFAIK.
 
If you can think of a better way to remove the hamsters from the wheels powering the servers, clean out there woodchips, fill there water bottles, and food dishes in less time, I would love to hear how.

:D
 
bonkrowave said:
If you can think of a better way to remove the hamsters from the wheels powering the servers, clean out there woodchips, fill there water bottles, and food dishes in less time, I would love to hear how.

:D
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ok, schedule different servers to have maintenance done on different days, split the workload. that way, if your main server goes down, you can still switch to an alt server to play in the meantime. this will allow them to get the maintenance in any one day done a lot quicker, while not totally disconnecting everyone, and pissing off a lot of people

after all, what are they up to now? 80 servers? they could split that up over 5 days, meaning they would only need to have 16 servers off in any one day....any emergency maintenance could still be done whenever needed, but still would not take anywhere near as long.
 
xXaNaXx said:
ok, schedule different servers to have maintenance done on different days, split the workload. that way, if your main server goes down, you can still switch to an alt server to play in the meantime. this will allow them to get the maintenance in any one day done a lot quicker, while not totally disconnecting everyone, and pissing off a lot of people
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.... but where do the hamsters go ?
 
Ya I'm guessing the Vivendi executives have the cardboard tubes permanently installed up there.

;)
 
while its annoying for us, shutting down and doing all their mainteance all at once will greatly reduce the overall time needed and reduce the number of data synch problems.

i have no idea what they are doing, my guess is defraging, and optimizing the database structures. id love to see how they have the DB environment setup.
 
Steel Chicken said:
i have no idea what they are doing, my guess is defraging, and optimizing the database structures. id love to see how they have the DB environment setup.
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That's what I come up with. But seriously, all servers down for 6 hours? C'mon. Do one cluster a day or something. That way you actually minimize your number of pissed off customers.
 
Steel Chicken said:
i have no idea what they are doing, my guess is defraging, and optimizing the database structures. id love to see how they have the DB environment setup.
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Something like this Im guessing.

computer_bum_full.jpg
 
I whish they would do it earlier, it ends at 3PM here!

THat mean for the next 3 hours, no WoW... :(

And I was all happy about not going anywhere today :(
 
Let it be known that the people on the [H] are the smartest people on the earth. They know how to fix everything and do everything perfect with absolutely no knowledge of the real situation. But they are also the most humble and therefore are not the richest. :rolleyes:

1. They have to patch all the servers at the same time or will get another group of people saying "you are discirminating against me by patching the other server first". There would be law suits and dogs and cats living together.

2. Because of #1 they probably need a sizable staff on patch do to keep things going at a good clip. This staff is probably across multiple facilities. It is alot easier to coordinate these people during NORMAL working hours. This is especially important since Bliz is probably renting facility space and needs the support of the staff that is supporting them.

3. For a majority of the year a large percentage of their clients are either working (heaven forbid you have a job and play WoW) or in school. Patching when people are working and they are working is a pretty good compromise.

But I forgot...we at the [H] have the ability to trivialize any problem and solve it in 3 seconds.

-tReP
 
And on the flipside, all [H]ard members have the ability to criticise others for making assumptions, while they themselves make assumptions on how difficult it must really be.
 
bonkrowave said:
And on the flipside, all [H]ard members have the ability to criticise others for making assumptions, while they themselves make assumptions on how difficult it must really be.
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Some of us can make qualified oppinions based upon actually working in that type field for a period of time. We can also make qualified oppinions who have friends who work in this field currently for multi-billion dollar companies.

-tReP
 
I just want to comment on the time the servers go down. Now you do realize that real live people have to do this work... right? Maybe perhaps blizzard likes to treat their employees with some respect and instead of making them do a overnight on monday night, when most people are playing... and instead have them come in early and start then. I have to do overnights at work every month or so, and It sucks, id much rather come in like 2 hours early and working during my regular working hours to do the job, I think they are doing things just right in that sense. But I do agree with maybe spreading out the work load, like maybe to 15 servers a day, everyday like from 9am-12pm. Would take less time and allow for them to be productive on other things as well.
 
I play WOW, but am I the only one here who doesn't really care about the maintance because i'm at work anyway.

[razz]
Sounds like alot of slackers need to get some jobs around here to me.
[/razz]
 
Trepidati0n said:
2. Because of #1 they probably need a sizable staff on patch do to keep things going at a good clip. This staff is probably across multiple facilities. It is alot easier to coordinate these people during NORMAL working hours. This is especially important since Bliz is probably renting facility space and needs the support of the staff that is supporting them.
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Since when is 5 AM normal working hours?
 
Hate_Bot said:
Since when is 5 AM normal working hours?
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As mentioned above, it is better than an all nighter. If somebody normally works from 8-5 everyday and then you make them do all nighters once a week...you will have some very pissed off employees.

I have sometimes come into work at 5AM...but done at ~2-3 PM and go home. It depends. But I would much rather come in early than work all night. My internal clock is not as messed up and I got the job done reasonably and still productive the next day.

Based upon personal experience...patch days are a bitch. When we did them at the university it was 5AM to 8PM and you were there till the last prof went home. :( It isn't enough that you get the patch out...you still need to deal with the fallout that occurs after. Murphy's law requires shit to go wrong no matter how well you plan.

Maybe parents should not be allowed to work on the house or do houshold work when the kids are awake since you are taking away valuable time from them. :rolleyes: Real people with real lives that just want to do an honest days work for an honest days pay. They don't want to be your personal slave because you play $15/month.

As I've said before and will say again..."If WoW is so bad, find another game" and "bitching on these forums will not be seen by Bliz".

-tReP
 
ryanrule said:
they arent doing a patch though. just maintainence.
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Good chance there is some patching going on server side to handle issues from the last content/client patch. Just like a web-site. May look the same..but the backend changed quite a bit.


-tReP
 
Dragonscript said:
I play WOW, but am I the only one here who doesn't really care about the maintance because i'm at work anyway.
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QFT. Quite a few MMORPG gamers prefer playing in the early mornings when lag is down. The only vacant time is during work/school hours in the middle of the week when the number of players is lowest.
 
xXaNaXx said:
ok, schedule different servers to have maintenance done on different days, split the workload. that way, if your main server goes down, you can still switch to an alt server to play in the meantime. this will allow them to get the maintenance in any one day done a lot quicker, while not totally disconnecting everyone, and pissing off a lot of people

after all, what are they up to now? 80 servers? they could split that up over 5 days, meaning they would only need to have 16 servers off in any one day....any emergency maintenance could still be done whenever needed, but still would not take anywhere near as long.
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You really think they're updaing the servers serially? All the servers are updated concurrently, so spreading it over 5 days will just means they spend 5x longer doing the updates.

It's easy to be an armchair experts if you're ignorant how things actually work.
 
Could someone post this again next week so I remember to be pissed off at Bliz. I never wanted to play during scheduled maintenance but Im just pissed off knowing that I wouldnt be able to if I wanted to. I mean what if there is an emergency?
 
urbsnspices said:
Could someone post this again next week so I remember to be pissed off at Bliz. I never wanted to play during scheduled maintenance but Im just pissed off knowing that I wouldnt be able to if I wanted to. I mean what if there is an emergency?
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emergency? chill out
 
urbsnspices said:
Could someone post this again next week so I remember to be pissed off at Bliz. I never wanted to play during scheduled maintenance but Im just pissed off knowing that I wouldnt be able to if I wanted to. I mean what if there is an emergency?
Click to expand...

My sarcasm detector is pegged...or is it broken. :D
 
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