Update, 1/26/07:  In order to resolve an issue in which the nightly avatar server restarts were sometimes affecting rental processing, the restarts have been moved to 12:10am Pacific time daily.  As a result, some of the issues that the restarts are meant to assist (e.g. avatar logins, spades performance) will persist for an additional 10 minutes and might take until 12:30am to resolve.

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We have discovered an issue where at midnight PST members may experience issues such as difficulties in logging in, and Spades game disruptions. Quite literally, these things break right at 12:00am.

While we work to isolate the cause and resolve the core issue, we will be regularly restarting all avatar servers at 12:01am daily.

A restart of an avatar server is nearly immediate, but there is degraded performance for a short time following, while the avatar server comes up to speed and rebuilds its caches. This period of time is usually no longer than 7-10 minutes. This period of degraded performance is regrettable, but we feel that 10 minutes for all to be healthy again is better than letting the issue sit until maintenance at 3:30am PST.

This is not considered to be a solution to the core problem, and is only being done as damage control until the real problem can be resolved.

-There Customer Support