Too many restarts! Or so it seems. I could be wrong.

[Citlalin]

Please help me understand why the server(s) need to restart so frequently.

The understanding I have is that there is some technical issue at hand, and if the servers are not restarted then we start to get problems, e.g. server lag or slowness, or perhaps the server becomes unstable.  I don't know what that issue is.  It just seems that there is one, otherwise we wouldn't need to restart nearly so often.

It sounds like there is a memory leak somewhere, or perhaps the system is not performing garbage collection correctly, or is not otherwise managing memory correctly, resulting, over time, in an escalating probability of disaster (the Architect is one of my favorite Matrix characters) in the form of unplayable lag, or outright server crashes.  We definitely don't want those.  But if that's the case, wouldn't the better long-term solution be to identify and fix that problem?  Or contact the Bukkit developers, or plugin developers, and work with them to develop a stable solution?

Please don't get me wrong.  The nerd.nu Minecraft community and game is a lot of fun.  I'm really glad you're online and I hope you stay online for a lot of years to come.  I just find that the restarts are a little disruptive and immersion-breaking, and I would like to understand what is going on that makes them necessary for the good of everyone — for plainly they are.  Understanding really is the answer to a lot of problems, and I think this situation is no different.  I definitely do appreciate that you are actively doing something to deal with the issue, regardless of what your solution is. 

With that in mind, what technical issue(s) do the restarts aim to solve?  What are the barriers to a more long-term, stable solution that doesn't require them?  Help me understand that.

Thank you for all the work that you do to make nerd.nu great, please keep it up!