Why do servers on video games shut down often? Isn’t there a permanent fix?

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Why do servers on video games shut down often? Isn’t there a permanent fix?

In: Technology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you mean randomly shut down, I don’t think it’s that often.

If you mean shutting down for scheduled maintenance, then that’s your answer: Scheduled Maintenance.

Just like when Windows has an update and need to be updated, and requires a restart, so too do the servers that operate the back-end of games. So the people who run the servers will schedule times to bring the servers down, apply patches and update, and then reboot them (also allows for them to make any scheduled hardware updates like RAM and HDD changes). Rather than have the servers come down unexpectedly and impact their players’ experiences, they schedule this maintenance.

If you’re playing a game whose servers are going down unexpectedly and regularly, chances are the player base is going to quickly diminish and the game will likely not survive long, or have a huge player base. *cough* Atlas *cough* Demigod *cough*…

Anonymous 0 Comments

Running a video game server without pause or restarting is really dangerous and prone to security vulnerabilities (you’ll get hacked). At the very least this will kick users to another server sometimes.

Longer downtime is necessary when they’re making significant changes to the game. More features often means more downtime

Anonymous 0 Comments

Video games can change frequently, so the code base needs to be updated. Many things can be hotloaded (added to the game without a restart), but often times, major architecture updates or significant changes simply require a restart to take effect.

Modern computers often need security updates. Rarely, hardware failures occur or data centers experience outages.

No, there is no fix. This is life. How come you don’t stay awake 24/7/365? =)

Anonymous 0 Comments

Contrary to what a lot of the people I work with seem to think (and I do corporate/enterprise level IT) there’s not yet a computer in existence that will not need to be shut down on occasion. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen servers that have been up for up to two or three years, but every operating system at some point will require a maintenance reboot (the two to three years uptimes were due to skipping regular maintenance, which adds its own risks)