Appears to be an issue with memory.

[Aerewen]

ok i've been doing some debugging tests with starting/restarting the server...

it loads all the zones properly and initiates the same 29 mysql connections that were there when the memory usage was quadroupled... after a complete reboot of the server i was sitting at 327megs of memory used... much much lower than the 1.8 gigs it was occupying before shut down. so this eliminates the possibility of mysql using that memory.

also this might be an issue with a memory leak since the task manager is showing the usage of world.exe and the zone.exe files to be under 48 megs each. most under 2 megs with the active zones (people connected) sitting at over 20 megs of memory.

somewhere in sharedmem or the world/zone connection, character creation, or maybe even quest functions... we are not freeing resources and/or leaking memory.

once i shut down the server binaries the memory usage drops back to 0 so this is definitely an issue with the server files.