Actually Metalbeast and his staff are doing something.
I contacted him on the 23rd about these errors and he said they were "Optimizing MySQL"
To be honest I'm thinking He and his staff.. thinks this site is useful for testing performance tweaks as they keep moving us to bigger and better setups.
According to Metalbeast, WarcraftRealms.com is now on a CDN aka
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network.
This protects the site from DOS attacks and local hardware failures.
I expect the continuing very short issues is due to their still working on getting the DB engines to handle their replications across the various servers in the CDN.
While these glitches are a bit of an annoyance.. as you noted almost always an immediate retry gets through.
In a previous message, Metalbeast as an aside mentioned a little about the server configurations..
Massive(at least to me) numbers of CPU cores and High order GB of ram...
enough that all processing was happening in ram with no need for paging from disk drives.
There have been a few oops! missing steps...
a system level cron job that helps with cleaning up the spambots got missed when the did a transfer to new environment..
But on the other hand, I don't know if anyone actually spotted when they did the cut-over.. I sure didn't.
I did catch a DNS IP transfer back around Thanksgiving when they did a DNS update and I caught in a mid transfer situation while using my remote admin tools.
I don't know if it was Metalbeast and crew but at one point their master spam blocking setup marked @gmail.com as a spam source.
