UO Server Downtime Schedule Details

Yeah, we all know it's a pain.  And people have been ranting long enough, at least on the UO Mailing List.  Xena Dragon raised once again the question, and here is what she got as an answer:

Why does it vary in it's time so much?

I received this reply from GM Darwin in regards to an email I sent tosupport@owo.com. I was concerned about the fluctuating times that various servers have been going down for maintainence. According to the server maintainence schedule published by OSI on their website, the servers aretaken down for maintainence at 5 AM local server time. This is not alwaysthe case and some servers have been taken down as long as two hours late.

Hi there,
I am sorry that the game server downtimes have inconvenienced you. Here is a detailed explanation of how the server downtimes work so that you can understand what is going on "behind the scenes" so to speak. :-) All of thegame servers begin checking themselves at 4:45 AM local server time for the last completed backup. Once a backup is completed after that time, the game "goes down" for its daily maintenance and immediately starts itself back up.

Therefore, if a backup completes at 4:59 AM, then the server will havea perfect downtime at 5AM, right on schedule. However, if the game completes a backup at say 4:20AM, it then begins the next backup, moving right through 5AM to whatever time it completes the next backup. The Ultima Online game servers are constantly in a state of backing themselves up. If the new backup happens to take until 6AM or so to complete, the server will continueto wait to go down until the backup is complete at 6AM.

We do shoot for as close to 5 AM local server time as possible. However, due to the enormous task of saving the game data associated with the giant Ultima Online world, we have to settle for a downtime of as close to5 AM as we can while maintaining the most current backup file.
Thanks,
Gm Darwin
Origin Systems Inc.

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