This announcement today says It does say 'no downtime'... but if that's the case, why advise us of it? /puzzle
A 'server bounce' generally means it's turned off and restarted nearly immediately. So while there is no planned downtime, everybody will get kicked off breifly
Wrong, it means they take the servers to the roof of an office building, typically 3 to 5 stories tall, and drop them on to a trampoline. In DBGs case they use a bouncy castle. It’s kimda like a server stress test. The can see how stressful it is on the server. Sometimes they yell obscenities at the servers to really stress them out.
Found this Bouncing the Server Bouncing the server typically requires a hard power off. This means that the administrator or technician must remove power to the device in a "non-controlled shutdown." This is the "down" part of the bounce. Once the server is completely off, and all activity has ceased, the administrator restarts the server. This is the "up" part of the bounce. If all goes well, the server will come back up to normal operating status. In the best of circumstances the administrator will be able to find log records indicating the reason for the problem. However, most of the time there is no indication of what triggered the need for the server bounce.
I would assume they do it to clear junk files that have accumulated, especially since new stuff is going live on the 16th, just to try to make the launch of it as smooth as possible. or likely to replace that sad little hamster who has no interest in his carrots anymore.
Often, software has resource leaks like for example memory leaks which means that over time, the server will exhaust its memory. Those problems can be extraordinarily hard to find and fix, so sometime as a workaround, there are scheduled server restarts because developers know how long the software can usually run before the problem gets too bad. Long story short: devs are reasonably sure that no problems will occur when the server restarts weekly, they are not so sure about skipping a week so there is a server restart even without a patch as a precaution. (As a side note, several of the missiles the army/air force use as weapons have known memory leaks in their control software, but nobody bothers to fix them because several seconds to minutes after launch they will have detonated or self-destructed, and it becomes a non-issue.)