Chapter 85: Unending Troubles

"The servers are overheating! Our servers can't hold out much longer!" an employee shouted loudly. This was to be expected—their calculations were accurate. Two million users was indeed the upper limit for their entire server cluster, and now that limit was being pushed, with simultaneous users still climbing.

"Boss, the server room's temperature has already reached thirty-two degrees, far exceeding specifications. Our servers can't handle this heat anymore—their efficiency is starting to drop!"

"What? Even with ten air conditioners and one central unit, we still can't keep the server room cool?" Huang He was stunned, though he should have realized that with so many servers crammed into one room, all running at full power, it was like the entire space was ablaze. It was no wonder the air conditioning couldn't cope.

"Cooling team, get in there! Use ice-cold towels to cool the machines!" Leng Zhimeng had made preparations. At her command, seven or eight bare-chested men rushed into the server room, each carrying tubs filled with a mixture of ice water and towels. They began wiping down the surfaces of the machines, using this rather primitive method to help cool the servers.

Despite its simplicity, the method worked. The servers maintained their efficiency, with no protective downgrades in performance. But it was physically taxing—less than twenty minutes passed before the men were exhausted or overcome by the heat, forcing them to leave the server room.

The second group of bare-chested workers soon charged in. This batch hadn't been prepared by Leng Zhimeng; she hadn't anticipated the first team would succumb to heatstroke, so she had only assembled one group. The second was quickly pulled from the leather workshop by Huang He, who had the workers strip off their shirts and head in to cool the machines.

After all, wiping down the machines wasn't difficult—one glance was enough to grasp the process.

No doubt this scene would draw criticism for being ridiculous or for lowering the intelligence of the characters, but it was undeniably effective. The servers' temperature was kept within manageable bounds.

However, while cooling could keep the servers from overheating, it couldn't raise their computational limits. As even more people joined the OO Voice Chat, the servers finally reached 100% operational capacity. They could still run in overload mode for a short while, but every second spent in this state was gambling with the servers' lifespan.

And there was simply no way to handle any more traffic.

Users chatting online began to notice disruptions—a sudden termination of conversations, forcing them to reconnect and attempt to resume their calls.

Initially, people were quite satisfied with OO Voice Chat. Though there was obvious lag, the sound quality was poor, and at least thirty percent discovered they lacked microphones or speakers, or simply had nothing at all—yet they still foolishly clicked on the voice function.

But as an experience in online socializing, it was a historic breakthrough. Everyone was delighted; compared to long phone calls, chatting online was vastly cheaper.

So when their chats started to stutter, users became deeply frustrated.

"What garbage network!" At first, users blamed their own connections, but when they realized other online applications worked flawlessly, they understood this was OO's fault.

A torrent of complaints erupted as users cursed OO, but the problems persisted—frequent disconnects and reconnections, only to disconnect again.

This was the grim reality of a server crash: once the servers fail, everyone's service goes with them. The servers hadn't completely failed yet, but they hovered on the brink, awaiting the day they'd need a full reboot.

Of course, users had no idea how precarious things were in OO's server room. They only noticed their voice chats becoming increasingly sluggish. The disruptions lasted for more than ten minutes, and just as many were about to give up in frustration, all OO voice chats were abruptly terminated. No amount of reconnecting would work.

Fortunately, the system pushed out a notification, informing users that the servers were overwhelmed by the influx of users and needed a reboot and repair—just five minutes of patience would suffice.

"Fine, five minutes..." Most users, caught up in lively conversations, didn't mind waiting. After all, just opening a game could easily kill not five but fifty minutes.

Most users spent five minutes browsing the web, then tried OO Voice Chat again. This time, things were much smoother—almost back to pre-crash performance. Everyone quickly forgot their previous annoyance and resumed their online conversations in high spirits.

"Brother-in-law, how about that? We moved fast!" Seeing the servers stabilize at around sixty percent heavy load, Leng Zhimeng smiled.

"You're far more capable than I imagined!" Huang He exclaimed. If Leng Zhimeng hadn't led her team to complete tuning four servers in just three hours, then orchestrated a five-minute pause to integrate those into the main server network and boost overall performance, the whole network service might have collapsed.

Just as he was thinking about the looming disaster, a sudden bang sounded and the entire server room lost power, plunging it into darkness.

"What happened?" Huang He rushed out to ask, but the answer was obvious—a cloud of thick black smoke drifted from the electrical room, and the electrician, Old Liu, dashed over, pale with fright.

Clearly, the Jiangnan power cabinet had exploded.

"What's the situation?" Huang He called out.

"Chairman, it's bad—we burned out a set of equipment!" Old Liu replied helplessly.

"I told you to use both the new and old power cabinets together! I've warned you—the old cabinet can't handle our peak power demands!" Leng Zhimeng shouted. Old Liu had no response; it was clear he'd slacked off when she was busy with the servers and hadn't followed her instructions.

Truthfully, Old Liu was competent and confident the cabinet could handle the demands.

Had they not added four new servers, his confidence would have been justified. But with those additions, the cabinet was doomed to fail.

"Never mind all that. Old Liu, how long will it take to fix everything?" Huang He asked.

"The old cabinet needs parts—earliest, tomorrow. But the new cabinet is almost ready. Give me half an hour, and it'll be done. Its maximum load is twice that of the old one—it'll hold!" Old Liu replied quickly.

"Get moving!" Huang He bellowed, sending Old Liu scrambling to fix the cabinet.

Luckily, it didn't take thirty minutes—only about fifteen before power was fully restored. OO came back online after a twenty-minute outage.

Despite the anxiety and constant mishaps, they managed to hold the line, at least far better than when the Queue World launched.

"Zhimeng, we owe you for your foresight—preparing the servers and power cabinets ahead of time. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been so lucky!" Huang He sighed. Leng Zhimeng's work had truly saved the day—he had never anticipated such terrifying traffic, enough to bring down not just the server cluster but the power grid as well.

He'd been careless; things had been going too smoothly lately, making him... less sharp?

Without Leng Zhimeng's preparations, OO wouldn't have been down for just twenty minutes—it would have been out for at least two hours, with forced throttling or a total halt to voice service. The hardware simply couldn't withstand such massive change.

"Brother-in-law, I just hope nothing else goes wrong," Leng Zhimeng sighed.

"It shouldn't... We've upgraded both the servers and power cabinets," Huang He muttered, "Unless the Wenzhou telecom goes up in smoke."