Victims of our own success

A number of players have noticed an increase of lag over the recent weeks and an increasing number of node deaths have been occurring. Stuck petitions have been on the rise and overall playability in high traffic systems has suffered as a result. The forums have been disabled at random times and the character sheet function is no longer available.

What happened? A combination of things, but mostly, EVE has been victimized by its own success.

The server hardware that I mentioned a month or so back has been ordered. Hurricane Katrina has delayed the arrival of the equipment. Rita has not been of much help, either. Once the equipment does arrive, it will have to be installed in the rack, some changes made to the server management software, and a period of downtime will be neededfor the installation. It is our hope that this will progress smoothly. As of this moment, I do not have an ETA for the hardware, but as information becomes available, it will be passed along.

While housed on a different server, the MyEVE pages have been struck by the same malady, success. The increase in subscriptions and trial accounts means that there are more players and even more characters for the MyEVE pages to track. Load on the forums, character manager and account management services, even that nifty Video section, has increased beyond the capabilities of the server. More hardware will need to be ordered for the MyEVE server, with the same upgrade procedure as Tranquility. In the mean time, the character manager service will be disabled, as we think it is more important to keep the news sections, Dev Blogs and forums available.

What does this mean in the interim? The server staff are going to be monitoring Tranquility very closely. Node deaths and CPU overloads will occur, some load balancing will have to be done on the fly, hotfixes will be applied as needed. The forums should stabilize with the character manager service temporarily shut down, but the occasional 'Forums Temporarily Disabled' page will show up.

Once the hardware for the servers arrive and is installed, all of the issues EVE is faced with will decline.