Procedure for maintenaces

[MCLueppers]

Hi,

I'm going to suggest you just one thing that you can include in your procedure for maintenance and execution of scripts: Create a copy of the DB/Server in a temp space and execute all scripts that you're planning to include during the maintenance.

Benefits:

• You can tell if it's going to work as expected
• You can estimate the time required to do the same in production

[Kismu]

Howmuch ever testing one does in the test server, things will still break in the production space!

[MCLueppers]

Howmuch ever testing one does in the test server, things will still break in the production space!

I'm not talking about the test server. I'm talking about the real production environment. If they snapshot it and experiment over the snapshot they'll know what might break or actually take forever to complete.

[Peajay]

This should never have happened.

The test server doesn't get properly utilized, it goes for days without anyone bothering to check if its even working. Updates which cause problems seem to go unnoticed, random server wipes and an awful pre-build island that most level 50 players would find unacceptable.
Every player on the test server has the same resources so trade is meaningless, when players need to test new features they have to wait days for explorers to find adventures before being able to test and report bugs. Its no wonder so few people were able to test the recently added adventures.

[MCLueppers]

This should never have happened.

The test server doesn't get properly utilized, it goes for days without anyone bothering to check if its even working. Updates which cause problems seem to go unnoticed, random server wipes and an awful pre-build island that most level 50 players would find unacceptable.
Every player on the test server has the same resources so trade is meaningless, when players need to test new features they have to wait days for explorers to find adventures before being able to test and report bugs. Its no wonder so few people were able to test the recently added adventures.

And again I'm not speaking about the public test server, they can have an internal copy for their own development purposes. Most decent companies follow such procedures.

[Xibor]

And again I'm not speaking about the public test server, they can have an internal copy for their own development purposes. Most decent companies follow such procedures.

I completely agree. In fact, my specific job is to maintain a QA environment which mirrors the production environment in every possible way (there are always compromises - e.g. I can't have 10k users online to my servers at the same time) but overall the hardware, software, networking, etc. are all mirrors of production. In fact, my test machiens run virtualized on exactly the same hardware as production which is also virtualized exactly the same way. All code is tested in the QA environment first before being deployed to production for the users to pick up.

I'm in a mainframe environment so I can't speak to the kind of hardware/software used by the game but I know the principles are the same and was quite surprised the developers/operators/administrators clearly had 'no idea' telling me they had not tried it yet - at least not in a comparative environment.