Server Restarts at Different Times

[Ben 644]

Would it be possible to have the servers restart one or a few at a time, so that there are always servers available to play in?

[Maf 32,328]

I'm not sure how the restart works in terms of technology (like what is it's purpose and how the servers affect one another during restart), but the 5 minutes it takes to restart are really not that long of a wait, so you just be patient. The reason servers restart at the same time is because at that time there is a least amount of players online, so by restarting the servers at the same time it will be an inconvenience for the lowest number of players.

[lordmostafa 3,821]

I'm not sure how the restart works in terms of technology (like what is it's purpose and how the servers affect one another during restart), but the 5 minutes it takes to restart are really not that long of a wait, so you just be patient. The reason servers restart at the same time is because at that time there is a least amount of players online, so by restarting the servers at the same time it will be an inconvenience for the lowest number of players.

There are two main reasons to reboot on a regular basis: to verify the ability of the server to reboot successfully and to apply patches that cannot be applied without rebooting.

 

Applying patches is why most businesses reboot. Almost all servers receive regular updates that require rebooting in order to take effect. As most patches are released for security and stability purposes, especially those requiring a reboot, the importance of applying them is rather high. Making a server unnecessarily vulnerable just to maintain uptime is not wise.

 

Testing a server's capacity to reboot successfully is what is often overlooked. Most servers have changes applied to them on a regular basis. Changes might be patches, new applications, configuration changes, updates or similar. Any change introduces risk. Just because a server is healthy immediately after a change is applied does not mean that the server nor the applications running on it will start as expected on reboot.

If the server is never rebooted then we never know if it can reboot successfully. Over time the number of changes having been applied since the last reboot will increase. This is very dangerous. :)

 

As for your suggestion about the time change, the answer is no. As said above, 5 minutes is not much, go grab a coffee while it's rebooting ;)

 

Closed.