Launch Update

It's almost 5am on the morning of launch. A few others from the game team have arrived.

The DBA's have completed the database schema changes and our Operations department should have published the expansion code to all of the servers by now. As soon as our QA department arrives the servers will be brought up for a smoke-test.

We just finished making some last-minute optimizations to our world server. This server is responsible for handling communication between all the zones as well as caching worldwide data such as vendors, guild bank items, etc. The issue on Nagafen yesterday seemed to stem from the worldserver hitting the process memory limit while loading all of this data.

So tonight we went over the code and found some places where we could drastically reduce memory during loading. We've made those changes, built the new server and copied it manually to Nagafen's host machine. Our initial test of bringing Nagafen up looks good and it didn't crash this time so everything appears to be working. We still need to have QA confirm that everything is working as expect.

In general, we would never make changes in this situation without ample time to test, but the three of us are pretty confident that the changes are low-impact and will allow us to get Nagafen back online. Worst-case scenario we just use the old version and keep the broker offline a little longer.

We don't plan to roll this version out to other servers though until it has been properly tested by QA.