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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-30-2010 @ 3:47PM
Brendan Drain said...
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.