Rolling restart

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Revision as of 11:07, 3 November 2009 by Torley Linden (talk | contribs)
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What is a "rolling restart"?

The Second Life world has thousands upon thousands of Regions running on a great many servers. Due to the sheer logistics involved with managing them, not to mention all our Residents who'd prefer Second Life to have as much uptime as possible, it's unfeasible to restart every Region at the same time when an upgrade needs to be deployed.

Think of a rolling restart like a wave: it doesn't occur everywhere simultaneously, but travels from one place to another. As some servers are restarting, others have already been restarted several minutes ago, and are coming online shortly. Thus, only a portion of Second Life is down at any one time. For example:

As with all of our server deploys, each region will be restarted once during one of the rolling restart periods. Most regions should be down no more than 5-10 minutes, although some fraction of the regions will take 20-30 minutes to upgrade. If your region stays down for more than 30 minutes, please contact support. Each region will receive warnings starting 5 minutes before that region is restarted.

Rolling restarts usually apply to all of Second Life, including Private Regions.

Specific details of how a rolling restart proceeds are sometimes announced on our Grid Status Reports, and more details are on the Server Deploys forum.