Off in the distance

Yeah, on patch day you can get all sorts of different errors depending which parts of the server farm have come up yet. It'd be fascinating to see a schematic of their internal layout. I do know that what we see as a realm is actually several servers (or possibly several processes on the same server), while multiple instances from different realms actually are held on the same instance server. There there's the internal "link" servers that handle messaging between the clusters, etc...