I’ve noticed this for a while now, but I have to know: what’s with fallen london blanking about at the turn of the hour?
It’s The Hours.
The legend returns to us…
I get blanks occasionally but hadn’t looked at the clock before. The last one was just at 10pm UK time so I got a blank at the turn of the hour.
Has been happening to me for about a year. I’ve just assumed it’s some sort of automatic update or maintenance process.
I see this fairly regularly too: if I find I’m trying to do things but the server appears to be not responding, it’s almost always at the turn of the hour. It resolves pretty promptly, but it’s a regular occurrence.
The site regularly bugs out for me, but I never made the connection with it being on the hour. I shall have to keep an eye on that in future, to see if it is indeed so.
Yep! Bang on 14:00, the game had a seizure. I’ve put it in the recovery position and called an ambulance.
Right now at 12:00, “Service Unavailable.” Huh, I wonder what’s up with that!
Holy crap, that’s a nice find! I never thought to look at the time when things went bad. I’m guessing it’s some sort of hourly script that nobody realised was wreaking havoc.
That, or someone in the code somewhere does something evil with the number of minutes in a critical section of the code - say, divide by them.
Server issues almost every time. There are very slim chances that you end of the connection is the problem, but you can safely assume that it’s not if the problem is not persistent over multiple sites/services or hours/days.
My play area blacked at 12:00 EST, but recovered more quickly than usual.
Have you played Persona 3? It’s basically the Dark Hour, but only server-side
It’s been happening to me for a while now. I always assumed it was a synchronisation thingy, implemented back when the timer used to get completely off the rails. Even today the timer is not always absolutely correct, but it’s usually just a few seconds. I’m not sure if the connection I’m drawing here is correct but it seems plausible to me…
It (usually) isn’t a big deal, but I’ve had it happen on multiple occasions when I’m doing a unique story, or something with high stakes. The results happen, but I don’t know what they are. Especially with the unique story storylets, it gets frustrating.
I’ve noticed this for a long while, also. I once worked for a company in early stages of development, and for a time they had their app servers cron’d to restart or to do some sort of forced GC every hour to deal with memory leaks. :-) Assumed perhaps something similar was going on here.