Server problems sunday evening

This evening we ran the new season update system without shutting down the site for the first the time. To be 100% safe we did a database backup before running the update, which forced us to shutdown the site for 25-30 minutes.

After the backup finished, we opened up the site and ran the season update. It went almost flawlessly and you could watch the progress on [url=/season_update]this page[/url].

The reason I say "almost flawlessly", is that one minor error occurred: All clubs that got a sponsorship received a notification stating that they did [i]not[/i] get any sponsor. This is now fixed so it won't happen again next Sunday. Please ignore the wrong notification.

Unfortunately the season update also caused some server problems. We had to shutdown a web server which then again caused another server to go down. This caused some sections of the site to run slowly between 6 and 7 pm. If you lost any values (Credits or players) as a direct consequence of these server issues, please do not hesitate to contact us via [url=/support]support[/url]. Please tell us what you lost, and why and when. I am sorry you have to do this, it really should not be necessary. You can rest asure we [b]are[/b] doing everything we can to prevent it from happening again.

It may feel as if we are not working much on improving the recurring "Sunday trouble". But in fact, we are. We have been working on improving the stability and speed of the site for a long time, and we have now almost reached our goal. In order to ensure a stable and fast Sunday update we do, however, need to improve our system, and all changes induces a probability of errors. I hope you will continue to bear with us while we complete our work.

Set aside the downtime today, I am very happy that we have finally been able to run a season update without closing down the site. I hope you are too.

During the next couple of weeks, we expect to be able to run an entire season update (including backup) without closing the site :)