It's not technically a "bug", but it could be considered as a fixable issue.. Since to me personally it made the game almost unplayable, because of how sluggish the game felt when it started lagging heavily.

It happened around 6:20pm server time during monday. The winter zone had at that point bit over 80 players are there was total of 254 players online.

I believe possible fixes could be adding the chat on different server than the actual game, or by splitting the zone into two different servers. I know the site is still in beta etc, but these kind of lagging issues should be adressed seriously, at least in my opinion.

It's kinda annoying playing game when every move takes over 1 second to happen and even over 2 seconds at worst cases. Especially since the game usually plays really smooth and fast..

I also believe that the core problem is that people know when the Ice Queen themed pets appear, so they all rush to play on same zone at the same time.. Which is the reason for really heavy load to the server..

Which is really shame, because I personally like the possibility of catching certain type of pets at certain times.. Since I can't play so much all the time, so being able to hunt for them is really great.. It's just shame that it also causes the lag issues..

Performance issues have been near the top, if not the top, of the list of our concerns for quite awhile now.

You fortunately weren't around in the days of nonstop Cloudflare outages, 10-30 second lag spikes, or even an overloaded Apache server crashing multiple times daily lol. Sylestia has come a really far way from those days.

That being said, yes, more improvements are needed, but at this time, there is no simple solution. For us, performance is 'good enough' for now and we're going to shift focus to more content/feature related updates for a bit.

These updates will also gradually help to improve performance as we make changes to site coding and our database.

The reason for the lag right now is simply just too much I/O. Our disks and CPU can't simply keep up when 100ish people are spamming the Site with queries. The solutions are really either to add more servers (but that's expensive) or to improve the I/O tasks so that they take up less time/resources. Atm, we're going to push for the latter.

So I unfortunately don't really have an answer atm other than you'll just have to manage with the 1-2 second delay during festivals. Sorry. =S Hopefully as each festival comes and goes, performance will gradually improve as we continue to overhaul the Site.