TL;DR
Every two-weeks @ 05:00 UTC, starting on June 29th, we’ll have regularly scheduled maintenance periods lasting for ~1-hour.
Updates… You like to have them, but you hate to deal with them. What with their pesky required restarts and high resource requirements.
For the longest time we have dealt with this problem on an entirely ad hoc basis, holding off until absolutely necessary to restart services and to perform required maintenance. While this was… OK, for the most part, it was far from ideal.
For one, those maintenance windows rarely gave people a decent heads up, and caused a fair bit of frustration/sadness from players looking to enjoy a round of SS13 on their favorite bee-station, only to be met with a potentially unexpected downtime.
For two, these sometimes spur-of-the-moment maintenance periods required a certain (very attractive) ghost to stay up later than they’d like to. Making them even more sleep deprived and error prone.
So, “how do we fix this??” I hear you ask. Simple. Regularly scheduled maintenance periods. The peanut butter to the honey sandwich of the dev-ops world. The bacon to the internet-BLT. Extremely exciting stuff, and I’m sure a vast majority of you reading this have jumped out of your seats in excitement at the mere mention of such a daring venture.
Starting on Tuesday, June 29th @ 05:00 UTC we will be undergoing operational maintenance for ~1-hour. After that point, every two weeks at the exact same time our services will be put into maintenance mode for the same ~1-hour duration. During this hour, you may experience brief service interruptions and/or slowdowns as we start working on our various services. We may be forced to bring the game-servers down temporarily during this period. In such cases, we will try to provide a notice in-game before doing so.
If you get disconnected unexpectedly during one of our maintenance periods, please do not talk about the round until either: (A) you reconnect and a totally new round has started or (B) the maintenance period ends. It’s entirely possible that you will be disconnected from the round even though it’s still on-going, and we don’t want anyone to accidentally give away details about on-going rounds.
Announcements and specifics for on-going issues or for upcoming maintenance periods will be posting on our uptime page moving forward. If you notice that the servers are acting wonky or if you aren’t able to connect for whatever reason, we recommend checking that page before pinging any staff.
