Down?

[FranklinWest]

Is the MUD down, or is it just me? Seemed like it crashed a while back and hasn't come back up yet. Let me know if this is just weirdness on my part, please? Everything else on my end is wall to wall and treetop tall.

[Quanqued]

It's back up, and a relevant note posted by Foxbird. I'll copy the contents in here for everyone's benefit.


[ 7] Foxbird: Downtime May 4-5
Date: Sat May 5 03:32:58 2007
To: all
===================================================
Folks,

I wanted to apologize for the recent downtime we've been having. Normally
we're a lot more stable than this, but it seems some things just aren't meant
to be for long. I'm working with like a 10th generation code here, and while
it's unique for the end users, it's a complete and total nightmare to
maintain.

As some of you are well aware, I've been pulling my fur out over this recent
series of crashes. It all seemed to be related to characters (both NPC and PC)
that had been removed from active service, coming back and pretending to be
active again. The behaviour has always been there, but is now just surfacing
due to lots of recent changes we made to the string handling code.

The good news is that I'm on the case. I've made two patches in the past two
days that seem to have slowed the problem down. The one two days ago was to
the aggro mob update code. If two mobs got in a fight, and one of them died,
there were certain circumstances that would bring this problem out (depends on
the order they were in the room). And the most recent fix had to do with
people who idled out. If you idled out with a pet, you and the pet would get
freed, which could cause the mud to exhibit interesting characteristics.

The reason the mud hangs, rather than crashes immediately and restarts, is
that I've got it running in a debugger during the day. The debugger freezes it
right before it crashes and allows me to examine the mud status at that time.
When I go to bed, I let the debugger free so it doesn't break the refresh at 8
in the morning. It can freeze for quite a while because I'm not always around
to look at things. So, I apologize for not spending my eternal lifespan
keeping an eye on your happy little universe.

The only down side to this whole thing is that I'm not sure how much more of
the code will need fixing for this. I'd hoped I'd caught the last one two days
ago, but apparently not. So, I'm hoping again that I've caught the next
sequence of bugs. I've removed the check from the code that caused it
to lag horrendously, so it should be back up to speed again. There's still
more checks I can remove, but I need to leave some of them in there to test it
currently. So, rest assured I'll try and get all of those things fixed up
soon. And if I get a chance, I'll look into why the mud occasionally locks up
for a second or two every so often. That one will be tricky, but I'll see what
I can find out.

If the MUD survives the weekend, I'll see what I can do about implementing
those changes for subraces I had discussed earlier. I know you're eager, but
there's no point in writing features for something that doesn't run. So, as
soon as we're stable again, I'll get to work on it.

Again, sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for all your patience and help
in this matter.

- Foxbird, the Frazzled Fox Admin

[FranklinWest]

You + Foxbird + Ithy, as always, rule. *snuggles*