Arelith

The servers (game and web) will be brought down tomorrow at about 12:30 GMT. The outage is only expected to last for about two hours (until 14:30 GMT), but this time may overrun if any problems arise.

The arelith.com DNS will then be updated to point to the new servers though you may need to connect directly to them via IP (138.201.20.77).

Reminder, this is happening in about twenty minutes.

Aaaand . . . we're live! Remember, you need to change the IP address which you normally login to:

138.201.20.77:5124 for Surface
138.201.20.77:5125 for Cities and Planes
138.201.20.77:5126 for Fixed Level.

Half a week in and migrations hurdles overcome, I think the results speak for themselves:

Before (a week ago; max of 60 players): http://i.imgur.com/2HraFCm.png
After (last night; max of 55 players): http://i.imgur.com/yWEmeb4.png

As you can see, the performance we're seeing has doubled during off hours, and during peak hours we're seeing an almost tenfold performance improvement. There are still some improvements to be made. I estimate we will be able to improve performance by another 10% - 15% by introducing further NWNX changes.

From my perspective, however, the most important performance improvement is consistency; we have full control over the hardware, so we won't see any more mysterious lag spikes as Jim from Node B turns on his dogecoin miner.

For now, players can access the performance monitor live at http://arelith.com/profiler. In the coming weeks we planning to introduce an even more detailed performance monitor which will be publicly available at http://perf.arelith.com.

We hit a peak of 77 players last night on Cities and Planes (and between 20 and 30 on Surface at the same time), peaking over 100 players for the first time in many months!

Amazingly, the experience was completely lagless; the performance of the Cities and Planes server, at its worst, was actually equivalent or -better- than the old server was at ten players, and the average level of performance over an hour of 70+ players was better than the average performance of the old server when empty.

As we can now spare the small performance hit, we rolled out a backend change last night that allows us to patch scripts on the fly. You should therefore expect critical bug fixes (of scripts) to occur live and without a server reset.

Update (several days ago already, but to avoid any confusion)

138.201.20.77:5123 for Cities and Planes

Temporary port change back to :5125 for Cities and Planes. (reflected on the portal)