Feldon Some very good news for Nagafen players who have been experiencing significant performance issues with the server for several months now. However this news is bittersweet for Venekor players who have been anticipating this server merge for several months now. Brenlo has posted this news on the EQ2 Forums:
I know many of you are looking forward to the upcoming server merge. Sadly, you will have to wait just a bit longer. We are postponing the merge until October 20th. So an additional month. As many of you know, Nagafen has had continued issues with the Database and while those have subsided some in recent days, we are not satisfied with the performance levels. We feel that moving more players onto the server in its current state would exacerbate the existing issues.
So we are going to take that month to upgrade the backend DB hardware and software on Nagafen. When we are done it will have the best array in the stack, significantly better as a matter of fact. We hope that this news softens the blow of having to wait a bit longer. During the month we will have a couple of extra downtimes as we migrate, first the hardware, and then the software. As we have dates for you, we will have Kiara post them.
Again I apologize for making you wait.
Alan “Brenlo” Crosby
Senior Producer – EQII –
This is not a decision that was taken lightly. Nagafen will be the first EQ2 server that is upgraded in hardware and software to 64-bit and the additional database memory that allows. This should substantially help with zone lag. Rothgar has shed some light in the same thread:
Just an FYI, we’ve been evaluating the DB upgrade for almost a year. This is not something to take lightly. We’ve had the new database version running in our QA environment for quite awhile. Deciding to push this new version to a live server in under one month’s time has risks of its own, but we feel this choice is by far better than going forward with the merge on existing hardware and risking performance problems that make the game unplayable.
This is not only a move to new hardware and a new database version, but also a move from 32bit to 64bit. This will allow us to allocate a significantly larger amount of memory towards the database cache which translates to much better performance for you.
We know you want the merge to happen asap and postponing it was not something we did lightly. We looked at every other option for insuring a smooth transition and felt that the other options could pose bigger issues. It’s difficult to gauge what impact the merge will have on the database hardware but we know that Nagafen is already under a bit of strain.
When the merge is behind us and we’ve had a chance to see the new DB hardware in action, we’ll make a plan for migrating the rest of the servers.
Note that Game Update 53 (Shards of Destiny) which has some very nice tweaks and upgrades or PvP gameplay is still on schedule for the end of the month, regardless of server upgrades/merges. Kiara posted this on the same thread:
Shards of Destiny is a separate thing and won’t be affected by the postponement of the merge. We feel that the hardware upgrade is important… so you guys can actually PLAY when we get you merged…
I can certainly understand the frustration here from Venekor players who are on a server with a dwindling population, and perhaps something can be worked out to make this a little less painful. But the result should be a rock solid server that can handle any traffic that players want to throw at it.
As a long time player on Nagafen i have to say this is very good news. The performance has been bad and getting worse since TSO. Can’t wait to not have 30-60sec zone times.
I knew this would happen. I think it’s funny, considering the fact that we had an entire guild pay money to transfer over to Venekor to try to get some uncontested avatar kills and then be merged back in a few days.
But regardless of those LOLs, Nagafen’s performance has been absolutely terrible for the past 2 months. It shows that we’re the top EQ2 server as far as population goes.
Raiding on a server with constant 1-2 second spell lag at prime time can make certain fights very difficult at times. Couple the servers own lag with a player whose internet might be lagging, or is playing from another country and you’ve got a recipe for disaster at some points.
It’s awesome to see they are doing this upgrade, and I’m really happy to see that for once they aren’t completely treating the only server that matters as an afterthought.