It seems pretty clear that the issues isn't with bandwidth. Otherwise it would eventually resolve on it's own when usage died down, which is not happening. My understanding is that they are having to actually reboot the entire server to resolve this. They are hosted on
http://www.serverpronto.com/ and I have heard they have the lowest package available from there. Even the lowest package there should be well more than enough to handle what we need.
I am sure many of the old timers remember the last hosting before it was moved to this one. I think it was about 2 years ago. From everything I remember about the old hosting, we never had this issue on it. This issue started almost immediately after being moved to the new hosting. It then got increasingly worse and worse every month and more frequent until it got to the point that it is today where it can fail multiple times almost every week. That tells me that it is very likely that the problem is related directly to the host hardware or software/configuration. But, that means it should be resolvable one way or another. My guess is that the problem is with the configuration for max connections and/or idle session timeouts either with MySQL or something with the OS itself. I am definitely no guru in either of those, but I am sure I could help find a resolution to it if I knew more of the specifics.
I joined IRC last night (which I never do), and made mention of the issues and asked if Rogean or Doodman would be able to discuss it with me. Both of them are logged into the IRC and Secrets says that they do stop by there fairly often. They weren't on when I left the message, but I am trying to get something started and would like to speak with them personally to see what can be done if anything. Doodman won't know me, but I think Rogean will recognize who I am. But, either of them can at least check the forums and see I am a mod :P
Either way, I am glad there is a bit of an active discussion going on about this now. For a long time, I was just ignoring it, because it was only happening on occasion and would remain up nearly a month at a time between major outages. Some outages are acceptable, and since everything here is free to us, we are lucky to have it all in the first place. But, the Login Server has proven that it won't be getting any better, only worse. So, it is time to take some sort of action. I am sure we can all come up with a good solution to this though.
IMO, keeping the Login Server centralized is one of the most important things we should be keeping in mind. As Yeormom said, it is nearly impossible to keep track of new or old or retired independent servers. Some servers pop up and disappear so quick that it would be hard for a list to ever be anywhere near accurate, at least not for long. The centralized login server is nice and easy and is guaranteed to have an accurate list of available servers! WoW emulators may be popular, but their community is completely split up all over the place. By not having a central Login Server, it means that each server has to advertise like crazy to get new members. I considered trying to start up a WoW server, but the community I could find and the fact that there are so many different versions and no clear central site or login was just too much for me to want to deal with. I didn't like it at all. To make eqemulator more like that would be a mistake.
Minilogin does have it's place, but I don't think it is the solution we need. Minilogin should be for what it is already used for; a close group of people/friends. It shouldn't be used for public logins. Mostly due to the same reasons I mentioned above about keeping it centralized.
Linear Mode
