Stability Issues and the Public Test Realms
US realms Bonechewer, Eldre'Thalas, Firetree, and Skywall were taken offline for a little less than an hour today for unspecified emergency maintenance. Checking the realm forums shows that all four realms have a collection of complaints about crashes and unexpected downtime this week, as well as a persistent rumor that the four realms live on the same server cluster as the public test realm - and thus experience heavy stability hits whenever the PTR goes live. While Blizzard doesn't release server information of this nature, it's an interesting coincidence that these realms seem to be having additional stability problems since the PTR came online again.
Does anyone from these servers have an opinion on whether performance takes a hit when the test realm goes live? Without detailed technical information being released from Blizzard (quite unlikely) we may never know if this is actually the case - but in the lack of other information, educated guesses may be the best we can hope for in the way of news.
