Those sort of errors seem to occur when the client loses contact with the server for some reason.
When there is lag and the communications continue, if the other end does not respond then the buffers fill up and the client crashes.
If an individual crashes then the most likely cause is the internet connection between your PC and the server. I have run some traces at times like that and used to hit a bottleneck somewhere in Florida (don't ask me why it goes through Florida).
Where there is mass lag or bootings then the problem is more likely at the server end (or close to it) or the game itself.
Every 6 hours the game does a complete data back up which will lag every one and every thing. This is run on the 6th, 12th hour etc US EST time. This allows us recover the game in the case of a catastrophic failure, corruption or hack attack. This goes for a few minutes. Note point above about buffers and lag. If you keep typing or tring to cast spells etc during this time there is a good chance the buffers will fill and "boot".
Every 60 minutes on the half hour the game writes all the data files back to disk. The game data is stored in memory and so it must be written back to disk occassionally. This used to be the cause of the "Rollbacks" in days gone by. If the game crashed and the data had not been written back to disk then the next time it started the game had rolled back to the last saved version which could be days or weeks old. The data save normally only lasts a few seconds.
We have been having some issues occassionally with the Linix box itself, where after about 6-12 months or so it goes really slowly. This has not been related to the game or the internet that we can see and the only solution was to restart the server itself. This was done in the last month and will probably happen occassionally in the future.
I am not aware of any other performance issues that are occurring and are repeatable. Intermittent issues are much harder to diagnose and resolve.
Thu Oct 28, 2010 5:12 pm