Planned downtime: Account format migration

[dexacu]

You called someone a retard. How is there no tone in that.

[Sevenless]

You called someone a retard. How is there no tone in that.

*gets popcorn*

This is turning out to be surprisingly good for a server down thread. I figure give it another 3 pages and it's shit again.

[Tonkyhonk]

Feel like a retard now? You probably should. If you were at all involved in the Minecraft community you'd know my name, anyway. I've been a major part of it since alpha and all through hMod, Bukkit, and Spout. But you don't, because you're a nobody. Get on my level

There was no tone at all.

oh really? you musta been blind.

hi sev

[Serejai]

Ah, the Haven community. How I've missed it.

Whine about how the game crashes all the time. Someone with experience and knowledge posts insight as to why it's happening and what can be done to fix it and you instantly start harassing them and telling them to leave. Good stuff.

Stop being an asshole and people will act in kind. That's usually how it works.

Yeah, I'm an asshole for trying to help jorb and loftar prevent future crashes and by informing people in the community why the crashes were happening. I should instead be a prick like you and the majority of other players in this community. Then I'd fit in better, I suppose. Can you teach me?

[sabinati]

to be honest you should feel like retards

[bitza]

honestly, you all are spending way too much time being angry about video games

[Tonkyhonk]

haven is no game, m8

[Zou]

haven is no game, m8

10/10 post would read again

[TeckXKnight]

Yeah, I'm an asshole for trying to help jorb and loftar prevent future crashes and by informing people in the community why the crashes were happening. I should instead be a prick like you and the majority of other players in this community. Then I'd fit in better, I suppose. Can you teach me?

Sure. Humble yourself a bit; this doesn't mean you can't qualify your information but don't come off strutting when you have no reputation in a community. Even when you do have a reputation it makes it seem like bravado more than anything else.
Be less defensive. People will sometimes bite but that doesn't mean you need to immediately turn into Xbox Live on them. Insults without adequate or proper reason or justification just make you seem like an ass. If someone, or a group of people, were legitimately provoking or being a dick to you then insulting them back in a strong tone leaves you in the right still.
Drop the sarcasm. Sarcasm never translates well even in the right moments. In the wrong moments, especially when there is any hope of a conversation going on, then it just further sets the tone that you're being an asshole.

Hth.

[loftar]

A game like this causes a LOT of strain on the hard drive because of all the read/write data it requires to update tiles.

It's not as if the changing of a tile translates to a hard drive IOP, however. The tiles, as well as all other data, are kept entirely in memory and only saved back to disk when the map area is being unloaded. The same can be said for most, if not all, other actions that can be performed by players. Haven doesn't actually use that much disk I/O at all.

Personally I would go with a Xeon minimum (and if they're using an i7 that would be one of the causes of random lag spikes) but overall the I/O is the bottleneck for a server like this and a 7200RPM HDD just doesn't cut it.

It doesn't? Since the BSDDB patch and kernel upgrade, I think the server has been handling exceptionally well. There has been virtually no server-side lag even with 1400+ players continuously online, and no sign of near contention, either.

Now, I don't know which specific hosting package is being used... but the lowest one comes with 16GB of RAM which should be adequate to run this server (although 32GB would be better) and an i7.

For the record, the hosting package we ordered isn't on the site any longer. The server has 12 GB of RAM and an i7 920.

On the other hand, it should be noted that Hetzner has previously been reusing used hard drives when replacing crashed ones. I don't quite know what to think about that, because there really is no reason to just assume that they are bad (they could have come from decommissioned servers or other harmless uses), and I can certainly see that it would be a pointless expense from their side to buy entirely new disks every time they build a new server or any time someone complains of dubious troubles with their hard drives. On the other hand, it's not as if they couldn't be bad, either. It's a good question whether the failures have been caused by the hard drives being latently bad or if there's something I'm doing.

On the other hand, I did notice that they have now added an option to have a completely new drive inserted instead, but at cost. I perused that option for one of these replacements, and the other disk also happened to be completely new (even though I hadn't requested it), so the server is, at least, now finally running on new disks. Let's hope that has an effect.

Either way, I can't really see that there's anything in particular that I would be doing that should be especially strenuous on the drives. Once this is all over and dealt with, I do plan to file a complaint with Hetzner about the horrible MTBF exhibited thus far (6 drives in less than 3 years is hard to ignore), but I would like to take this opportunity to mention that, apart from the disks, I have enjoyed Hetzner quite a lot. They're very "hands-off", their network works well, their support crew is reasonable and quite accommodating, their automatic management options are very nice, and their quite cheap for all that; so if I were to change providers, I don't really know to what.