Hello, This is to Higby and his management team. I have run game servers for many years. I am trying to understand why it takes 2 hours to patch 5 servers? There has to be something horribly wrong with the server update process. In addition to running game servers, my primary career was in the area of Process Control. This combines quality, design implementation, and manufacturing engineering into one entity. Although initially developed for the Automotive Industry, the Process Control field is very successful in many types of industry. Today's patch was 859mb. Unless you have unusually slow connections to your servers, that should have taken about 10 minutes to upload and install. Even the cheapest server I ever owned through NFO servers would have downloaded and installed that patch in under 6 minutes. I made a post last week regarding "Process Control". As a former Process Control Expert, I strongly suspect you are in great need of one. There is never a good reason for something to be complicated and time consuming. Good designs are very simple and easy to maintain. There is something horribly wrong here and I am trying to get a better understanding of your process. This is costing you large sums of money over a 12 month period. In addition it is eliminating a significant amount of play time from your player base over 12 months. Although I am retired, I suppose I could take a look at this process for you and see what I could suggest. But I really think you guys need to look into at least hiring a current reputable process control expert on contract to eliminate these needless costs. It seems like a shame for you guys to be wasting all this money and our play time.
my point is, it does not matter if the patch is 859mb or 10 gigs in size. Two hours is very excessive. Even a 10gig patch should not take a server more than 15 or 20 min to download and install. For it to take them two hours, something has to be FUBAR in their system or process or both.
Patch size is pretty irrelevant, yeah. But as a former IT Manager, I don't think it's that simple. Imagine they are adding fields to the database, so they drop an index then rebuild another. How big a database do they have ? How many tables are they changing ? Do the monitoring servers need to be modified too if they are watching new variables ? Anything has to be resynced ? etc... I'm not saying things are perfect, I have no idea. But I don't understand how you can be so assertive on the patch time, for me it has nothing to do with "simple" dedicated game servers that can be updated in 30 seconds (I've done that too).
I have no idea either. I can be assertive on patch time however because even if they have to do everything you described above, if the system and process are designed properly, there is no way 5 servers should take two hours. That amount of time is absurd. It is 2014.... the technology exists for this to occur in a very short time.
I should add ,this thread is not intended as a negative slam on the Dev Team. I am trying to point out that they are likely losing a significant amount of money for what may be some very bad reasons. Specifically inefficiency and process time. There are experts available that can solve these issues which are many times very complex and require someone who is trained to look at the entire system, break it down, fix the broken parts. Usually these problems are very difficult for the people directly involved with the system on a day by day basis to see properly.
Well, looking at the threads, I'd say the downtime is the least of their problems You might really consider giving Zathrus a call after all. Doing a big patch just before a weekend... really?
