INS servers ping went to 700 last night

[SoulRipper]

I was in the FF ON server and there were a lot of people, at least 20 playing. I think the other server was similar. Then all of a sudden at about 00:30 Mountain Time (02:30 Eastern) on Feb 4 (Wednesday morning) everyone's ping went up to 500-900. I went to look for someone to help. When I checked back everyone was gone from INS because of the problem. The ping was fixed by then but it was too late. Right now there's 3 and 4 players on each server. It seems suspicious. As a former System Admin, you usually see a network spike in a datacenter in the middle of the night when backups kick off. Any chance there was a backup job or some other cron job (or scheduled task on Windows) that loaded down the server at that time? I went on IRC but no one answered. No I know is online in Steam, so I'm posting this hoping someone can look into it.

 

[USCG Hammer]

Thanks, I'll bring it up to Garden when I see him.

 

[SoulRipper]

One more thing, if you look at the GameTracker stats for the last week it looks like the number of players drops drastically at about 12:00am every day (is that Pacific time?) except for Friday, in which case it dropped before 12:00am but at the same time on both servers. It looks like the server is scanned every hour so if everyone drops off between 11:30pm and 12:00am Pacific time that would correlate with what happened last night.

 

[SoulRipper]

I'm seeing the same dip in traffic in other games too (go to historical data and click Week, you can see a strong spike down at the same time every day):
TF2 DUSTBOWL:
http://www.gametracker.com/server_info/72.232.197.26:27015/

CS:S DUST2 (note that it happened earlier on Friday, just like in INS):
http://www.gametracker.com/server_info/72.233.91.34:27015/