Why is Wizard's Site down at this critical time?!?

[Someone]

Apparently it's working again (for me at least)

 

[Khairn]

This is the biggest reason why I am extremely skeptical about the DI. Heck, in 4 years they haven't been able to get search working on their forums, let alone run anything even resembling a decent Web application. Without a massive and fundamental reinvestment in infrastructure, which appears from gleemax etc. to NOT be happening, they will never have anything worth using on the DI.

/sarcasm on

Shame on you for not jumping on the DI bandwagon and bringing up actual performance as an example!

Haven't you heard that WotC has told us that we have nothing to worry about!

Their cunning plan to prove their mastery of the technological side of the DDI is actually quite brilliant. WotC is not actually creating any new functionality, but instead are cobbling together different programs, functionality and skins using a combination of contract programmers and in house employees to provide us with the most amazing computer interface and support system available for D&D. And they are doing this at the same time as they are beginning consultation with their customers to determine what we actually want? Multi-tasking at its finest!

We should all be ashamed with ourselves for doubting WotC and their ability to create an electronic wonderland for all table top gamers!.

/sarcasm off

Sorry about that, but the timing of the up - down - up - down site at the same time WotC is extolling this new digital direction for the table top RPG market was too timely to pass up.

 

[Alnag]

It is up again. But I can't log in... it just still switches to Guest...

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

They have nine months to learn from the past 24 hours and be ready for it again when people are going to be expected to being paying for service. I assume that right now things are not fully place and they blew their estimates on how much traffic they would get.

I am willing to give them some slack to let them learn from their mistakes and plan for the future. We'll see what happens in May when the PHB hits the shelves and then I'll decide just how worried I should be.

 

[Xyxox]

I think we can all be upset with wizards because the website crashed. Maybe it was a marketing mistake. maybe it was the countdown so the page loaded on billions of computers simultaneously. maybe maybe, because because.

However, to truly criticize, i think that one should be prepared to say they could have done better. I mean truly have done better that the given situation and possibly even been in a similar situation themselves (job wise) and succeeded.

I'm not It so i don't know if I could have done better.

This doesen't mean we cant be displeased or want better service though. I just think the ultimate scrutiny is left to those with this skill to understand if this was wtc incompetency, or some though out of their hands.

It doesen't instill me with confidence in DI though... thats for sure.

I've done the same thing on many occasions over the past seven years and succeeded every time. The key is for marketing and IT to work through the projections together and IT must allow for a fudge factor.

Based upon the fact that the site is still down 18 hours later, IT never implemented a scalable solution for the web portal. If you notice, your hit to the D&D site redirects you to announcement.wizards.com, which would be a quick fix web server put in place to handle the load of a single HTML page being hit millions of times each hour.

What does this mean for the DI? Their infrastructure is in no way ready for such an initiative, especially given the CPU, memory, and disk I/O load requirements for thousands upon thousands of instances of that fancy "movie demo" they had at GenCon. If I were the CIO, I would immeidately outsource the hosting of the environment to a company with the capabaility of scaling on demand or pump enough dollars into an infrastructure to handle it in house. Based upon the demonstration of the tabletop and character generator, this applicaiton will be incredibly memory, CPU, disk I/O, and bandwidth intensive unless there is a planned client piece for the end users. Even then, there will be a high load and a truly scalable solution will be required.

 

[Mark]

(. . .) a truly scalable solution will be required.

Nutshell.

 

[Xyxox]

They have nine months to learn from the past 24 hours and be ready for it again when people are going to be expected to being paying for service. I assume that right now things are not fully place and they blew their estimates on how much traffic they would get.

I am willing to give them some slack to let them learn from their mistakes and plan for the future. We'll see what happens in May when the PHB hits the shelves and then I'll decide just how worried I should be.

With any luck, they'll let the user community beta test. Then ENWorlders can pound on it and hopefully help them size it right.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

I've done the same thing on many occasions over the past seven years and succeeded every time. The key is for marketing and IT to work through the projections together and IT must allow for a fudge factor.

Based upon the fact that the site is still down 18 hours later, IT never implemented a scalable solution for the web portal. If you notice, your hit to the D&D site redirects you to announcement.wizards.com, which would be a quick fix web server put in place to handle the load of a single HTML page being hit millions of times each hour.

What does this mean for the DI? Their infrastructure is in no way ready for such an initiative, especially given the CPU, memory, and disk I/O load requirements for thousands upon thousands of instances of that fancy "movie demo" they had at GenCon. If I were the CIO, I would immeidately outsource the hosting of the environment to a company with the capabaility of scaling on demand or pump enough dollars into an infrastructure to handle it in house. Based upon the demonstration of the tabletop and character generator, this applicaiton will be incredibly memory, CPU, disk I/O, and bandwidth intensive unless there is a planned client piece for the end users. Even then, there will be a high load and a truly scalable solution will be required.

thanks for your input Xyxox. its nice to get a view from some one who works with It and has a strong familiarity with it. When i got on, a few hours after count down, i did wonder about that video and if it was the best idea.

from my uneducated view, the countdown was a problem in that you have so many people hitting the link at once. I mean the page even had a auto load, so everyone with the countdown open would be loading up the page willfully or not.. I think with an unannounced launch, it could have relived some pressure. Not hosting the video to begin with also would have been a good idea.

Xyxox, do you think wizards had get new hardware, or pay out more for their T1 T3 etc? how do you think they fixed the problem? or was simply that people who wanted to visit the page already, have?

 

[Umbran]

Based upon the fact that the site is still down 18 hours later, IT never implemented a scalable solution for the web portal.

Um, to most of the industry, as I understand it, "scalable" does not mean "able to handle unpredicted short term heavy-load spikes". "Scalable" more usually means, "as the user-base grows, we can easily add to our capability without changing the basic architecture". But this doesn't mean that they can necessarily slap in a new server on a couple hours notice.

What does this mean for the DI? Their infrastructure is in no way ready for such an initiative...

Well, considering that the fullness of the release is still eight months away, this is hardly surprising. Entire server farms can be installed in that much time - so what we see today really isn't an indication of what we'll see in May.

 

[F4NBOY]

9 million WoW players don't play in the same server....