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EVE New Citizens Q&A

 
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What's the deal with daily maintenance?

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Kingsley Delvecchio
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#1 - 2017-06-26 10:12:14 UTC
I just picked this game up again and I was wondering what the deal was with the daily maintenance? Most MMO's I have tried have
monthly (or sometimes even longer) maintenance cycle, but after 14 years CCP has not been able to match that. Does anyone know why this is the case?

To be clear, I'm not knocking the game or anything, I'm just very curious about this sort of thing.
Trevor Dalech
Nobody in Local
Deepwater Hooligans
#2 - 2017-06-26 11:07:56 UTC
Short answer: Legacy code


In the 14 years since the north of Eve there must be a lot of processes coded to expect a database reset every day, removing all of this will take a very comprehensive review of every single line of code.

In fact, the daily downtime has significantly shortened over the years, it used to be an hour every day but it's usually around 5 minutes nowadays.
Steve Ronuken
Fuzzwork Enterprises
Vote Steve Ronuken for CSM
#3 - 2017-06-26 11:12:12 UTC
Trevor Dalech wrote:
Short answer: Legacy code


In the 14 years since the north of Eve there must be a lot of processes coded to expect a database reset every day, removing all of this will take a very comprehensive review of every single line of code.

In fact, the daily downtime has significantly shortened over the years, it used to be an hour every day but it's usually around 5 minutes nowadays.



To expand on this a little, it's also used for moving solar systems around on nodes. So you can have systems reinforced and so on.

Woo! CSM XI!

Fuzzwork Enterprises

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Syriana Vollare
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#4 - 2017-06-26 11:23:45 UTC
Trevor Dalech wrote:
Short answer: Legacy code


In the 14 years since the north of Eve there must be a lot of processes coded to expect a database reset every day, removing all of this will take a very comprehensive review of every single line of code.

In fact, the daily downtime has significantly shortened over the years, it used to be an hour every day but it's usually around 5 minutes nowadays.


Thanks for the clarification, but honestly why would be 5 min a problem to anyone?

Odealo
Farmer Goodman
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#5 - 2017-06-26 11:49:30 UTC
I wasn't suggesting it was a problem, It was just something i found curious because almost every MMO i've ever encountered did maintenance cycles on a monthly basis rather than daily, including older titles like FFXI.

Anyway, thanks for the responses. I appreciate it.
Memphis Baas
#6 - 2017-06-26 12:15:13 UTC
Every other MMO has server shards that match the local prime time (they'll do maintenance when your time zone is at 5 AM or something), whereas EVE has a single shard with everyone online, so no matter when they pick the maintenance hour, it'll be inconvenient for someone. They picked 11 because it's in the middle of their work day; it inconveniences Asia-Pacific-Australia players (it's in the middle of the evening prime time for them).

Otherwise, the game database is pretty big, and although it's been modernized where solar systems can be moved to other processors without the need for a shut down, they still need to do some off-line processing on it. And if we let them know of planned big battles in advance, they'll assign those solar systems to reinforced processors manually, so they can handle 2000 players fighting each other.
ergherhdfgh
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#7 - 2017-06-26 18:48:32 UTC
There used to be a lot of things in the code that relied on the daily cycle. CCP has been chipping away at most of it and have hinted that the downtime might go away at some point in the future. They have been going through the game and re-writting and updating a lot of it. PoSes are going away soon and I believe that they were part of it.

One thing that I can say is that asteroid belts get re-populated over downtime. So currently without downtime the game would run out of asteroids.

However as has already been mentioned many of the things that used to be done at downtime have been updated to not need downtime any more.

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Donnachadh
United Allegiance of Undesirables
#8 - 2017-06-27 13:43:30 UTC
A planned evening with friends playing your favorite online game, only to arrive at the designated moment to find that the game is not online due to unplanned, unscheduled and unannounced down time for a major bug fix or something else. Alone this is the single best reason for the scheduled daily maintenance cycle that CCP uses, and the single worst thing about all those other games.

But then perhaps those other games have a daily maintenance cycle and you are not aware of it because it occurs while you are sleeping, and games with servers dedicated to specific geographic areas have that option. As noted by Memphis Bass above with a single server for everyone that plays the game CCP does not have that option.
SurrenderMonkey
State Protectorate
Caldari State
#9 - 2017-06-27 15:07:00 UTC
Hamsters gotta eat.

"Help, I'm bored with missions!"

http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/wtd/
Earnest Emu
KarmaFleet
Goonswarm Federation
#10 - 2017-06-27 17:42:21 UTC
Syriana Vollare wrote:
Trevor Dalech wrote:
Short answer: Legacy code


In the 14 years since the north of Eve there must be a lot of processes coded to expect a database reset every day, removing all of this will take a very comprehensive review of every single line of code.

In fact, the daily downtime has significantly shortened over the years, it used to be an hour every day but it's usually around 5 minutes nowadays.


Thanks for the clarification, but honestly why would be 5 min a problem to anyone?


Clearly you don't do roams or partake in the really awesome structure bashes round that time.
radkid10
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#11 - 2017-06-30 08:07:56 UTC
probably to clean out cobwebs or remove cockroaches and pick up the beer cans

seriously it's a server cluster there's a lot of technical failures we do not know about cuz they probably work the servers to the Bone
try using 200000 hard drives in a raid configuration they probably have to replace 15 to 30 drives a day maybe

basically those drives back up each other datastore to both if one fails they have the other one and when that happens they put a new hard drives in