I just wanted to take a moment and send a public "thank you" to VATSIM supervisor Mike Sweeney for helping out vZME last night.
Atlanta was hosting their very popular Atlanta Live event. As their next-door neighbor, Memphis saw a large spike in traffic within our airspace as we provided en-route services onto the ATL arrivals.
I have never seen so much traffic showing up on my scope and apparently neither had my computer...as I struggled to maintain a connection to the network. I tried many different servers to no avail.
Mike gave me some great pointers on how to massage my visibility range and center to exclude the lion's share of the traffic inside ATL's airspace that I didn't need to know about. After a series of adjustments between visibility range and center, I was able to find the right combination that only included a small overlap of neighboring ARTCC's and only included my heavy traffic load.
With upset pilots, a disgusted, stressed and annoyed controller (me) sometimes the easy solution just slips right past you.
Thanks Mike. These pointers really helped and made my connection for the rest of the night more stable.
