Planned Maintenance and Special Event

The database includes a table called "pokemon". As its name suggests, it contains information about every single Pokémon on the site - almost 10 million of them! This includes things like what species it is, what gender it is, whether it's shiny and albino or not (or both), its name, where it is in your fields and many other things. In particular, it includes how much EXP it has accumulated. This is the problem. When an interaction is made, several things get saved to the database. This includes how many Credits and Interaction Points you have. How many times you have interacted with Pokémon belonging to the owner. All of this is specific to you. However, the EXP on the Pokémon can be affected by several people at once. This is especially true for people with large Fields, where users may spend a lot of time interacting. It also happens with the Pokérus host quite often. The issue is the infamous Deadlock error. When two users happen to interact with the same thing at the same time, it is possible for the server to try and handle both at once. Naturally, it can't do this, and as a failsafe system one of the two users will be told they cannot do it at that moment, in other words they receive the Deadlock error and instruction to try again. Several efforts were made to stop the Deadlock errors, such as improving the manner in which errors are handled, but to no avail. Right now, the errors are silently ignored, allowing you to continue interacting. It was decided that the slight loss of EXP associated with silently ignoring the error was acceptable if it meant reducing the amount of visible errors. However the errors continue to happen in other ways and most often with Pokérus hosts. For instance, if the host tries to move a newly hatched Pokémon to a field at the same time someone was interacting with it - something very likely when Pokérus is involved - the host would potentially receive a Deadlock error. This would slow down their ability to play the game and benefit properly from Pokérus. In extreme cases, the Pokémon would disappear completely (temporarily, thankfully) as the database and Memcached become desynchronised. In order to fix this, the EXP will be saved in a separate database table. Any deadlock errors on that table will continue to be silently ignored, but their effect should be minimal. In fact, moving the data to a dedicated table should improve how that data is handled resulting in fewer potential deadlocks. But more importantly it will allow for other things like renaming the Pokémon to be completely unaffected by unusually high activity, resulting in a better experience overall. Please be aware that since this is a fundamentally core part of the system, changing it may lead to possible instability. While every effort has been made to ensure this won't happen, mistakes are possible. I will do my best to make sure that any bugs that do emerge are promptly fixed. To give an idea, during early testing of the new system I accidentally de-levelled my Houndoom to Level 3. Oops. But this is why we have daily backups :)

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