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Anyone else noticed change of POS tick time?
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Jarnis McPieksu
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#1 - 2012-01-28 08:44:50 UTC  |  Edited by: Jarnis McPieksu
I just noticed something odd with the reaction tower farm that I run... it seems that the exact minute of the hour that each tower ticks on has changed for at least three of the towers - possibly for all of them.

I specifically onlined all towers in this farm in the same 10min window of the hour so they would tick at a predictable time (without having to look up each tower's tick time from a cheat sheet) and now they no longer seem to match that. Has anyone else noticed the same thing? Is there any rhyme or reason to it?

I believe this started when towers started eating fuel blocks. I believe that during that downtime something caused the POSes to temporarily freeze and then start their hourly cycles again - causing the cycle time to shift.

(why does this matter? Well if you haven't run any reaction towers, you generally don't want to be offlining/onlining silos for emptying/filling them on the minute the tower cycles or you can lose one tick worth of materials in the process because the destination silo was not online on the moment the reactor wanted to poo out another cycle worth of materials)

Edit: hmm, I just remembered the "calendar shows when fuel runs out" feature. Extremely helpful as fuel tick = reactor tick. It really seems that every single tower has switched to ticking at xx:31 as that's the time each tower shows on the calendar.

Well, that solves that. I'll leave this post up here just in case someone else has run into the same issue and/or hasn't noticed yet.
Skorpynekomimi
#2 - 2012-01-28 08:55:01 UTC
It was probably something they did to enable the switchover; essentially rebooting the ticks on all the towers at once, rather than coding for it to happen when each one re-ticked.

Economic PVP
Jarnis McPieksu
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#3 - 2012-01-28 09:02:34 UTC
Skorpynekomimi wrote:
It was probably something they did to enable the switchover; essentially rebooting the ticks on all the towers at once, rather than coding for it to happen when each one re-ticked.


True. In retrospect seems obvious.

Well, in case someone didn't know, now they do. Also the fact that you can now visibly see your tower tick time from the calendar is very very helpful. No more emptying tower fuel to trigger a warning mail to see the time :)
Smoking Blunts
ZC Omega
#4 - 2012-01-28 10:28:38 UTC
for some reason prior to the change over the pos tick time for a lot of our towers had shifted forward by a few mins. this is over almost 6 months. only reason i noticed it was looking at the old spam mails for tick time then waiting for the fuel to be taken.

OMG when can i get a pic here
Abdiel Kavash
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#5 - 2012-01-28 21:29:14 UTC  |  Edited by: Abdiel Kavash
The tower tick time constantly shifts, and the rate of the shift is different for each tower and also varies over time. As far as I can tell there's no rhyme or reason behind it, from the user's point of view it's random. Usually the rate is about 1-2 minutes each month, although I've experienced as high as 10 minutes in one month, or even it shifting backwards.

I haven't looked at the calendar notifications closely yet, so I don't know how accurate those are.
Taedrin
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#6 - 2012-01-30 20:40:46 UTC  |  Edited by: Taedrin
I would imagine that the variation in POS ticks has to do with sever load. Else it might just be because of some sort of clock drift.

EDIT: Never mind, clock drift shouldn't matter since everything is based off of the server clock. Don't know what I was thinking.