[Mattmeck1]

Update: Lag issues should be resolved now. Please comment if you see otherwise for more than just a couple of players. Sorry for the restarts, just trying to iron a couple of things out. Should be done now.
We have found the cause of the lag issue. It is a networking issue between boxes. Our networking Admin Hexagon has made an appointment with the data center for later this evening to personally fix the issues.

We are sorry for the issues this is causing and we have worked hard to find the cause, hopefully after tonight the issues will be resolved.

Thank you for being so dedicated to Eternal-WoW, we know you expect better form us, we expect better from us too. We are working hard to improve the community, and there is just some growing pains (communication issues between our 4 dedicated boxes) we need to work through.


Please be patient with us, once these issues are resolved Eternal-WoW will enter a new era of stability and performance that you our players deserve.

[shatteredinsides]

I will continue to wait. It is a privilege, not a right, to play on this server. I thank you and all the staff for supplying this service to us.

Tell Hexagon I said good luck!

[Cyph3r]

We have found the cause of the lag issue. It is a networking issue between boxes. Our networking Admin Hexagon has made an appointment with the data center for later this evening to personally fix the issues.

We are sorry for the issues this is causing and we have worked hard to find the cause, hopefully after tonight the issues will be resolved.

Thank you for being so dedicated to Eternal-WoW, we know you expect better form us, we expect better from us too. We are working hard to improve the community, and there is just some growing pains (communication issues between our 4 dedicated boxes) we need to work through.


Please be patient with us, once these issues are resolved Eternal-WoW will enter a new era of stability and performance that you our players deserve.

A more technical version of this is that we tried a form of virtualization (vmware esx) that in Hex's testing, produced good results, but in our live environment, hits some sort of network/IO limit around 800 players online and starts lagging more severely the higher the player count goes.

We will be reverting our new boxes to our previous setup tonight and by morning we should be be on our new server boxes, but with old architecture, and thus more lag free than ever before.

Please bear with us during the lag today and the expected downtime tonight to resolve the servers, and by tomorrow, this will start to be just history.

[acidburn901]

Awesome :] ty

[enri96]

Beh i hope you started now to solve it because i just got crash in game and needed to restart PC!
Something to say.
ICC its full with lag.Sometimes i go there i got crash and lag like damned!

[Kabat]

with the old architecture, will that mean they will get the old ports back?

since i cant reach the new ports.

just wondering.

it might fix my log in issue on remorse

[-Mac-]

Thanks for finding and fixing the issue.

Maybe a "working" coupon to make it up to us?

[enri96]

Fuck Fuck Fuck everytime i go in that fucked ICC in that son of bitch Lord i got crash and need to restart PC!!!

[chillitarier]

GOOD TO HEAR MATT^^

and sounds very plausible,too.At least to a hardware nerd xD^^

Nice work.....

[toughcub]

It is a RIGHT, NOT a privilege to play on this server. I donated here so that the server and everyone else can enjoy their time here till their hearts content, and I love seeing this server and community grow as time passes by. My investments were well made

[Cyph3r]

It is a RIGHT, NOT a privilege to play on this server. I donated here so that the server and everyone else can enjoy their time here till their hearts content, and I love seeing this server and community grow as time passes by. My investments were well made

I'm not sure I agree with the "right, not privilege" part. I would say it's a privilege, but management here treats it as seriously as a right. Eh, to better phrase this, "it is a privilege to play here, yet management treats it as their duty to the community to strive everyday towards perfection". And for those of you who've donated, I believe you have a 'right' to expect the quality that your donations help afford. Perhaps this is all semantics.

Either way, I can tell you that our goal is to be the best in every way, and we are constantly being our own toughest critics in an effort to improve. This is one of the longest running private servers in existence, and I can very confidently say that we will be around far after the others have come and gone. This is only true for two reason: 1) our commitment to excellence and to providing the community with a stable place to call home, and 2) more importantly, our loyal, large, and ever-giving player base, without whom, we'd never have existed in the first place.

In addition, we have a protection or "Plan B" in place for most every calamity that could potentially affect us ready to go. If some large catastrophe happens to the server, we most assuredly have already thought of and implemented a backup in place to recover quickly from it. For example, we now have DDOS protection to protect against attackers (ever since our major DDOS attack last month, we've been attacked every couple of days since, but due to this protection, no one is any longer even aware it is happening), we have redundant everything (power grids, harddrives, servers, NIC cards, power supplies, backup unit) in order to recover from failures, we take daily backups and snapshots to insure that recovery from data loss is at most minimal if it ever occurs, and on and on (this is why the largest (and only) rollback we've ever had was 5 hours, about 14 months ago), we've just purchased servers larger than we need in the near future to plan for future growth, we're hosted in another country where what we do is perfectly legal, and we have multiple development teams working on different simultaneous projects that we'll announce when they reach fruition. These options don't come without a price, and this is the type of thing your donation money goes towards. Even with all of this in place, we occasionally falter, and we get up again with a new mechanism in place to prevent the newfound calamity from occurring again. If you can find another private server anywhere in the world who takes your personal entertainment so seriously, I suggest you donate to them also.

I promise you that your donation investments here are put into the server, and when we suffer with issues, no one is more stressed about it than myself. Not every choice we make pays off (most do) - like our choice to implement virtualization - yet the hardware I purchased will undoubtedly prove how directly your donation money improves the server, once we can get past the implementation pains. And that time should be tomorrow morning, unless further complications arise. <knock on wood>

So tonight when two of the realms go down for maintenance, and in the future when we hiccup, remember you are in good hands!

[vrogue]

thank you for a straight up and honest updates. i really appreciate that. keep up the good works

[Xynergy]

thank you for a straight up and honest updates. i really appreciate that. keep up the good works

What he said. Very well communicated, Cyph3r.

Though I wonder, why would you implement virtualization for a service like this?
I mean, a Xen hypervisor can get a 98% efficiency in terms of FLOPS compared to the original hardware.
What part of the service are you using this (ESX(i)) technology for at the moment? I'm very curious.

Syn

[Cyph3r]

thank you for a straight up and honest updates. i really appreciate that. keep up the good works

What he said. Very well communicated, Cyph3r.

Though I wonder, why would you implement virtualization for a service like this?
I mean, a Xen hypervisor can get a 98% efficiency in terms of FLOPS compared to the original hardware.
What part of the service are you using this (ESX(i)) technology for at the moment? I'm very curious.

Syn

We were trying this on the game server boxes themselves. We had previously tried Xen and found similar network and IO limitations, but more severe on Xen (also Xeon manifested some additional noticeable latency). Both Hex and I have used Vmware in other environments successfully and had hopes that the newer ESX 4.x, which in our tests performed at "near bare machine" levels would work, but in a live situation (it's almost impossible to simulate accurate live environments in tests) it gets 98%+ efficiency, but starts hitting limitations after a certain throughput threshold.

We really wanted to use virtualization for the flexibility it offers, the isolation it offers by being able to run different realms in different vm's and let the hypervisor manage QoS and priorities, and snapshotting and quick moving of VM's to new hardware when a failure is imminent.

However, looks like we'll be scrapping all of that, because, at the end of the day, all of those features are a distant second in priority to being lagfree.

We're not exactly sure where the limitation is occurring, but we simply cannot continue the fail fest any longer. I suppose in a gaming environment, trying to introduce another layer of anything (especially virtualization) is always going to introduce some latency... and gaming is one of the few latency super-sensitive niches out there.

[burningvice]

I am extremely happy to see that we are constantly kept in the loop to the inner workings of the server. In my opinion, its donation money well spent and I am glad to be a part of it.

[jhucks2235]

Seriously? I mean you can't warn the players when you're going to close things down? Is discretion a big deal to you guys or something?

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you guys are fixing the issues, but a warning to when you're closing it down would be nice. It's very frustrating when you're in the middle of doing something and the server just closes down.

[Chlora]

Hey all power to you guys. I'm glad the server is down, why? Unlike other servers your actually fixing the issue and not just covering it up. Other servers just make new patches to try to cover up the problems the last one has caused but you guys are actually admitting the mistake and fixing it. Gj guys and take your time.

[XsupremeX]

I will continue to wait. It is a privilege, not a right, to play on this server. I thank you and all the staff for supplying this service to us.

Tell Hexagon I said good luck!

My thoughts exactly. I think you guys do a great job, ppl just like to bitch and whine. Half of them wouldn't begin to fathom all the shit you guys do.

[jc97912]

Well, I'm shocked. I can honestly say this IS the best private server I've played on. There will be a$$holes and noobs out there who say "Oh well they have laaaggg i can't play!!" But either they're ignorant, or can't read forum posts....or both lol. Anyway, wow. Thanks for everything.
-McLovin

[wowfjd]

Thank you for all of you taking the time to fix and help so many issues that you have been. All of you have truly done a great job and are continuing to do an even greater job. It is a privilege to be able to play on Eternal and the other servers for that matter. We will all be patient and thankful for the hard work you all have dedicated!