I'd like to pop in here and preempt anyone posting about the slowness we're currently experiencing here. This is due to a number of odd issues, that kind of chained together.
It started earlier this week with the downtime we experienced earlier in the week. There were two power issues at the data center this week which caused a number of odd issues with the system. While these would have normally been handled by the UPS properly, the UPS had an odd sort of standby mode before the power kicked in, hard rebooting all of the systems.
The hard reboot caused a bit of corruption in the hard drives, and as a result, we took the system offline to ensure everything was peachy-keen. When we brought everything back online.
Apparently, we didn't bring everything perfectly back like we had thought, and some the slave servers fell way behind the master servers (which they are frantically trying to catch up).
Under normal friday afternoon load, this wouldn't be a problem to just let the servers catch up (which can take hours), but half of the WoW servers are currently offline, which means that a limited number of servers that are actually up to date are handling a higher than usual load, giving us the current slowness.
While we could take the servers offline for about 2 hours to do a quick maintenance and get everything running up to speed after that, it's likely that in two hours everything will be caught up and/or the WoW servers will be back online, lightening the load. So instead, we'll be performing a maintenance this weekend to address the slowness issues, and keep the sites functional, but perhaps a bit slow for the next hour or so.
So I'd like to apologize for not forseeing this particular chain of events. Once we get this stuff REALLY fixed, we'll be good to go and the sites will be screaming fast once again
For the downtime earlier this week, the downtime that will be expereinced during the maintenance this coming weekend, and for the slowness now, we'll be giving all sites a 5-day extension to their subscription.
Thank you all for your patience.
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It's all in the reflexes.
