We're pleased to announce that our Server Maintenance was completed yesterday without any downtime and was a success. You may remember that on March 23rd we wrote in the news about the new load balancer. Back then we had hoped for it to be completed and live by March 25th but as usual, things don't always go as planned and it took an extra month of work and testing to be sure it worked correctly.

For those who would like to know more about what the changes mean, I will try to explain:

Before yesterday, Marapets had 24 different servers that load the PHP scripts and generate all of the pages that you visit around the site. Whenever you visited a page, one of these would be picked at random and you would be sent to a random one. This worked OK, but not great. Random is random and it would send too many people to one server and less to another. It also didn't know the diference between a CPU intensive page and a basic page, so some servers could be getting lots more load while others are sitting idle.

We now have 63 different servers that run our PHP scripts - nearly 3 times as much as before! And we also have a brand new, very smart Load Balancer that makes sure that each time you load a page on Marapets, you are always sent to the server which has the lowest load! You should notice that Marapets is running faster and smoother than ever before and will continue to do so at all times of the day, no matter how many players are online.

Marapets has had 100.00% uptime performance so far for the whole of 2019 and we are constantly working to make sure this remains. Thank you for all of the Account Upgrade buyers who have helped us to manage this!

Our servers are located in Canada and our players in North America currently have a slightly better experience than our players in the rest of the world. Our next planned upgrade - which we hope to manage later this year - will be to improve the speed of our network for players outside of North America.

The Photo Parlour in Lush Lake has been improved and has brand new artwork. Staff also have a new system in place now where they can upload and release new photos and plates to the site without my help. From now on, when a new pet colour or minipet is added to the site, staff will aim to have their photos and plates added to the site later the same day. There may still be times when they are added a little later that that - so it is not a guarantee - but it will still be much faster than before!