CCP explains plan to get rid of EVE's daily downtime
by Brendan Drain 
Oct 30th 2010 at 11:00AM
Filed under: Sci-fi, EVE Online, News items
CCP's efforts have not been in vain, as the past few years have seen the duration of downtime drop from an average of 50-60 minutes to under 20 minutes. In a new devblog, CCP Hunter explains what has been done to reduce downtime and what the future holds for New Eden's daily slumber. The devblog reveals that most of the current downtime is taken up by server shutdown and startup procedures, with only five minutes of actual maintenance processes per day. Once all the processes required for the daily downtime are removed, the plan is to have the server running permanently.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Prime Synergy said on 11:35AM 10-30-2010
That's really darn impressive. A small, but interesting read too. I'm usually sleep when the server goes down so this won't affect me either way, but this is probably great news for some.
Now CCP, stop trying to distract me with all these cool announcements and get back to working on Incursion!
Reply
archy and mehitabel said on 11:38AM 10-30-2010
hmmm.....i guess racing to get online and do that dangerous hop or trying to get past that gatecamp will get a little harder.
Reply
lamthara said on 2:37PM 10-30-2010
i thought about this too.... ^^
Fausts said on 12:46PM 10-30-2010
Without server downtime I won't know it's time to go to bed.
Reply
sudocow said on 3:03PM 10-30-2010
Can someone tell me what year it is on earth again?! hmmm ... Maybe it is time for me to go back to my clone.
Reply
jmmo said on 3:38PM 10-30-2010
About f'ing time. When I tried a free trial (about a year and a half ago) the downtime made it almost unplayable for me (as the only convenient free time I get is early morning european time). I'm sure I'm not the only one.
And, seriously, why did it ever need to go offline? Yes, single shard, etc. But other MMOs handle their regular maintenance requirements without downtime, and I don't really see why EVE ever needed to be different. A little thinking about instancing can deal with the respawning asteroids problem, and load balancing is something other MMOs have been dealing with since the very beginning without huge issues...
Reply
Brendan Drain said on 3:47PM 10-30-2010
Most MMOs have scheduled maintenance periods. There are database cleanups that just have to be done and they can't usually be done while the server is online. World of Warcraft servers, for example, have a weekly downtime for maintenance lasting several hours.
Load balancing is also something that must currently be done when the server is shut down, as transferring a process from one piece of server hardware to another would interrupt all operations on that process (potentially disconnecting thousands of people from the game). Other MMOs don't run into the issue because they don't use EVE's single-server structure and so don't need to perform any regular load balancing. They just limit the number of people that can sign up to a certain game server to keep the entire game server's processing requirements within the spec of a single computer system.
wooki said on 4:16AM 11-04-2010
WOOOO.
Downtime is right when I want to play the game. CCP + 10 internets
Reply