Funny, that was 6 yrs ago. You think Cryptic would do their homework.

lol Blizz wasn't much better at launch. Although I'm sure now after the fact Blizz has a load of preventative knowledge that they could provide considering they had to go through it all.

It depends. I've worked on massive database servers that have taken the better part of a half hour just to make it through the POST sequence. Then if you had to do a file system check you could be waiting quite a while longer.

this is sad... this is gonna be 100 time worse when the game goes full on live on 2-2-2010

Cryptic offices and staff on the FAR WEST COAST.

STO server farm on the FAR EAST COAST.

Comcast in between.

What do YOU think is happening?

p.s. Last word I heard on the number of machines in the "shard" before the additional hardware was ordered at beginning of OB - 50 machines with a terabyte of memory.

It's worth noting that WoW wasn't stable for a long time after it went live. It's stable now, 5 years after the fact. Back then, not so much.

As to the original question: It depends. There isn't just a single server that has to be dealt with. They are actually a cluster of quite a few servers and a lot of other junk. I used to work on a cluster that would take 3 hours to reboot. And that was only shut down and restart. If they are having to dive into code, add new machines to the cluster, replace hardware, or any number of other things, it really could take a while. Give it some time, this is the shake out cruise and no star ship ever left space dock without something going wrong. That's why they call it a shake out cruise.

To much to ask to have some one at Cryptic write a post about what they are doing?

Please tell me they aren't using some dumb Windows attempt at a server. Though it would clear up things, since a Windows server can't handle any type of a strain.

We don't know exactly what they're doing, but I'll pretty much bet it's not rebooting servers.

The only way I could imagine it could honestly be that it takes so long to reboot the servers is that they need to push new code onto all of them, and their servers all have to sync the new code from a limited number of "code synching" servers. But that seems pretty improbable to me. The bulk of the data is content, and that doesn't change rapidly. The actual "guts code" is likely very small, and that's where the bugs would be.

The only things I can think of, other than there not being enough people ready to get things done (which I doubt given the importance of this event to Cryptic) is that either:

1) They are freezing the universe and trying to find the cause of each problem and fix it so it never happens again, needing time to troubleshoot. IMO, this is a mistake. Better to copy out the data surrounding the crash, maybe quarantine the actual machine that faulted, and get the world back up. You can then work on the bug while people play and schedule downtime to fix it. Odds are, if the world crashes again, it will be a different bug, and you can find/fix more bugs in less time this way.

2) The bugs are requiring some time consuming process, such as updating/recovering/reindexing the entire database, to fix. This could be the case if they don't have good referential integrity in their back end storage. But having a large number of bugs of this kind would be extremely unusual.

The servers went down 30 min ago, not any word from a poor group of developers? Hmm. I don't know. You tell me