EVE Online is running another ‘no-downtime’ experiment this week

Shall we play a game? EVE Online’s Senior Live Director Erlendur S. Þorsteinsson aka CCP Explorer would like you to play forever. OK, maybe not forever, but definitely without any downtime. That’s the focus of his latest blog, which heralds a second “no-downtime experiment in EVE.” His ultimate goal is to get the current 3:40 downtime from rebooting the EVE server even lower.

“The purpose of this second no-downtime experiment is at least four-fold: verify the fixes made for the issues discovered in the previous experiment in the live production environment; verify that no other code/features have regressed since last time and in general look for further issues; observe memory usage; [and] verify that our technology platform (which you will hear more about later) is not making any downtime assumptions.”

The last event helped CCP fix some errant issues with timers in the game, as well as memory usage and time desync. “No-downtime is a long-term goal and all our technological advances aim towards that,” Þorsteinsson says. “We have been working for a few years now on a micro-service and message bus technology platform for EVE, and started using that platform for a number of features. We now want to observe how that ecosystem holds up with no downtime of the primary game cluster, making sure no assumptions have been made about a daily downtime.”

This leg of the test begins September 9th.