Site Status

[sean]

Hi everyone,

First off, sorry it's taken longer than we hoped to get the site back up. Since we took it down we've taken a number of steps to improve matters. Here's a summary:

1. Ticking has changed significantly. At the top of each hour, the main game will be inaccessible while the whole game world is brought up to date with the new tick. During this period, you will be brought back to the lobby page, which gives accurate feedback on progress. This takes 2-5 minutes to complete currently.
By doing ticking in this way, instead of on-demand as kingdoms are accessed, we improve overall site performance considerably. Prior to this, the process of ticking all the kingdoms was competing for server time with thousands of frustrated players hitting F5 in their browsers, which in turn made the problem worse. Now, instead of suffering bad site performance for 10-20 minutes now there is just a few minutes of pure ticking, followed by good site performance.

2. A few provinces' data had become corrupted because there was an issue with training. To fix this in the short term, there is now a cap on how many individual batches of troops you can have in training at any one time. There's a similar new limit on the other schedules, e.g., learning and exploring.

We hope that with these changes the server will stay up during the night. Tomorrow we'll post another update with an assessment of how it went.

Thanks to you all for bearing with us while we work through these difficult teething issues.

Brian & Sean

[Thundergore]

We are working on getting a further update for you.

[Brian_]

Hi All,

Last night we deployed new code with several performance improvements. Immediately after opening up the site it was hit with very heavy traffic. Soon after, the server came to a grinding halt.

From looking at the trends in the traffic it appears that much of these requests are coming from automated scripts. Whether these scripts intend to distrupt the site, or belong to people trying to play the game is currently unclear.

Even though the number of requests was very high the server should never come to a halt. When this happens it means there is a problem with our code, a problem with our configuration, or a problem with another component we're using... Regardless, there is a problem which we must solve.

Today it's a case of starting investigating again. Eventually we will figure out where the problem is and it will be fixed. We have a good lead at the moment, but as with all things of this nature, it could come to nothing or it could be the breakthrough we're looking for. This is the main reason that it's near impossible to give an accurate estimation of when the problem will be fixed.

Once the problem is solved, scripters will continue to be a problem. Simply put, if there are 100 scripted requests for every one human request, the humans will suffer - this will be an ongoing problem.

To keep you somewhat informed, we will continue to update the notice at utopia-game.com. This at least tells you that the game will NOT be back for X hours, and you can get on with other things while checking back at utopia-game.com just once in a while.

Thanks,
Brian & Sean

[Lydias]

Finally we are back online. Assuming all goes well overnight, ticking will resume at 11am GMT Tuesday morning.