Tom Ellis
So what’s going on with the Auction House is an interesting tech problem, a well meaning and simple design change caused a DB table that used to hold 20-60k rows to now contain tens of millions. Not a problem by itself but we’ve got some code changes to make to support this new world we live in. We’re going to throw more hardware at the problem with maintenance while people far more clever than me work on actual solutions.
The WoW Auction House is a complex transactional system similar to that of Stock Exchanges worldwide. These systems are susceptible to small changes in transaction times, which can have cascading effects, leading to the whole system ending up stuck or incredibly slowing down almost to a halt, so it isn’t surprising to see that such a change has impacted it so much. Hopefully, these changes coming with the next maintenance window, likely during the Weekly Reset, will remedy the issues until they can figure out ways to address the underlying issues.