Issues with mobs disappearing

I was doing the haunted tower and the skellies would disappear after I started fighting them and then they would respawn and then I could actually kill them. One of the times I had a hard time moving on as even though nothing was attacking me it said I couldn't escape.

I have no idea if it has any connection or if its just a lot of people collecting junk, but I have also noticed world saves easily take twice the time they used to and I often lag a second time just before or just after a lag for world save +/- 1 minute.

I have reset the server time clock back to the correct US EST time clock again. It was about 4 hours out (fast) for some reason.

The game saves (write memory files to disk) occur every hour on the half hour.

The game backups occur every 6 hours where a backup is taken of the disk files and zipped (to allow the game to be restored later if needed).

Both these activities will cause lag in the game, normally measured in seconds.

This should not normally cause NPCs to respawn though.

This didn't occur at the time of the backup and it occurred with about 4 skeletons in a row with each starting to fight me and then disappearing only to respawn a few seconds later.

Sounds like it was bad luck and you just happened to be there when they reset, all npcs reset once a day and many have found it to be at bad times for them like in the middle of prison or necro quest.

Good point Dinin.

The NPC resets will be in sequential order of their template ID and hence will tend to happen in runs in the same place.