A slight server snag, has been fixed now.
Full description follows:
For some reason, the minecraft.net server was strangling itself. I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong at first, so I just restarted it. That seemed to fix it, so I left it alone.
Then I got reports that people were unable to log in, and I got curious. In an attempt to see what was going wrong, I cleaned out the backups directory (after having saved them), and I noticed they were being written very fast, like once per second.
A while back, I made the server save a backup of the full user database whenever the database changes. I also made it
store the last-logged intime so I can clear out unused accounts (ie registered and last-logged in same date) if I
ever need to in the future. When people log in, that flag gets changed.
Saving the database is blocking and takes
just over one second. If a lot of people try to log in, the server will get very busy.
So now it’ll only update the backups “every once in a while” on logins, but always and immediately on purchases.
That seemed to solve the problem. =)
