The Lands of Arda

Gupps · Joined: 07 Feb 2007 Posts: 485

Id like to say before I post this a lot of it is speculation and old info from when Arda was originally written (from talking to madwak and its original developers.)

Arda seems to have been going down a lot recently. These server outages may have been deliberate by Aule, however im guessing its probably a crash.

Unlike a lot of modern MMO i suspect a large amount of processing is carried out server side on arda. I also supsect the majority of crashes are simply due to the server timing out when it gets suddenly hit with a large amount of server side processing to do. There isnt much we can do to stop this aside from clearing up our spawns and loot and trying to keep items on bank characters rather than having overfull inventories on our play characters.
AOE spells especially blade barrier and clouds seem really good at lagging the server but as these are usually cast by NPC's we cant do much. (there was a time that casting huge amounts of blade barriers was used on arda to purposly crash the server and this has been somewhat sorted since it began to be used as an exploit... ID LIKE TO POINT OUT THIS HAS BEEN FIXED BEFORE ANYONE TRIES IT.)

In all of ardas history for some reason 2-3 hours after a server reeboot the server will time out and crash, i dont know why but this brings me to my point. Left to its own devices the server will come up again after this crash; however a problem arises here.

When the server is loading up, whether after a crash or a reeboot there is a large amount of server side processing that needs to take place. If people start logging in while this is happening, adding the loading of their character and all their items to an already heavy server load, the server WILL bounce out again. This happened the other night resulting in the server crashing 6 times in the space of 15 minutes.

Why am I posting this?

Id just like to ask people that when the server crashes or times out they do not immediatly try and log back in. (Sometimes after a timeout the server will still show as up and the worst thing you can do here is immediatly try to get back in!)
Likewise after the server resets, looking at the server status and the minute it shows trying to get back in is disasterous.
While watching the ping to drop before you try and enter helps somewhat it is often innacurate. 90% of the time when arda drops it will reeboot / reload, or it didnt really go down it just timed out and will right itself.

Im a just asking that when this happens rather than log in you go grab a cup of tea, say hi to the missus, feed the cat, get a shower etc.. before trying to log in again. Give the server about 5-10 minutes before logging back in and dont all dive back in at once try and go in individually.

This isnt mean to sound like im preaching just some info that can hopefully keep arda up and stop the downtime we are having at the moment.