I thought I would take the time to address the recent
lag issues a little...

As I'm sure you all know, we recently bought a new
server (conveniently named 'Torturer' due to its mean,
black looks). Both BatMUD and HCBat were migrated to
this new host last Saturday.

The old mudhost (Baal) will be reinstalled in the
upcoming days, after which it will become our primary
webserver. In the meantime we have had to transfer
most of our services to Torturer, which especially
causes an occasional strain on the database (thus
also making the MUD lag). Once Baal has been re-
installed, Torturer will no longer need to deal with
the load of any web transactions.

Additionally, we have been working on optimizing alot
of the database tables. Unfortunately, when we optimize
them, there is a slight period of lag as the tables
are reconstructed. One example of this is the change
in the chestserver tables which effectively cut the
handlingtimes of chests to 1/10th of what it was before.
These changes should speed up the MUD in the long run.

Finally, we're redoing the backup system, and testing
various ways of implementing it. Our hope is that we
may be able to produce a system which doesn't lag,
but which produces consistant and frequent backups of
all data from the MUD.

Anyhow, the occasionally lag that is caused by
administrative tasks should decrease by the end of the
week. In the meantime, hang in there.

++ Gore