I sort of agree here. I don't play online much but the forum servers definately suffer from a "oh god it's weekend again, I can't take another weekend" slowdown. Seen other posts saying pretty much the same. Maybe some weekend bottleneck issue at SD's hosting backbone?

Yes that's what I meant, I'll edit to clearify. I always post with the optimistic thought that a SD employee is reading it

No they are overwhelmed by the huge amount of players... all 500 of them.

God forbid this game becomes really popular and we get thousands players connected at the same time.  Sometimes I even get the feeling they are purposly pushing players away from the game by leaving it broken and bugged, otherwise they'd show how incapable they are in hosting a large multiplayer system.

Meanwhile, on Gamespy... 167,981 gamers are playing right now...

Right now, the main issue that I'm aware of is that Joeuser.com has tendrils into the same system that handles the logins and games list (AFAIK the NAT servers are entirely separate). As the internals of that site are very old and messy, it tends to cause problems when JU gets busy. While we can kick the system when we become aware that it's slowing down, it's unfortunately not a simple matter to resolve completely.

And yeah, opengames does not give complete stats. There are about 2700 players right now (rising since we're getting into Euro afternoon) and it gets around 3-4000 during normal non-peak hours.

Err he explains in the very same paragraph?

By the way the problems with speed I get are forum only, so according to your (SD's) post that has no correlation with joeusers.com?

[edit] ah below post says databases too.

I thought that demigod's game list and logins are on a separate server and do not share the same "space" with Joeuser.com. Or maybe i don't understand this correctly, as i'm not a network savvy person.

jouser.com is a Stardock product too, it's their choice to share it.  Besides we're talking a game that reportedly had 100k sales a month ago.  Thats 4-5M $$ sales. 

I was thinking joeuser was their own product but a quick glance on the site didn't tell me that. Anyway, they should still be able to seperate the two databases and host them on seperate machines. Don't flame me for this but I assume Stardock forums aren't major hits/second pages. So all that is needed is a decent machine to serve some database requests. Hardly a cost that a game publisher would be scared of. They probably have some other servers they could shuffle around with and in the end host every site on a server that can take the load. Now, that said, yes I do know that is a LOT of work and a LOT can go wrong. Still, it's nothing that a professional can't handle.

Given that everything needs to access the customer DB (with 3.6million+ accounts), no, it is not a simple matter of "move the DB". The load issue needs to be fixed internally on JU, but it's not something that can be done instantly as most of the webdev staff is different now from those who wrote the JU backend and there are many other jobs that need their attention as well.

Indeed, this seems like a serious oversight now

This seems to get more frequent .