more information from my tests. i have copy pasted my post from the steam forums. my point about servers being "loot locked" for several days is what has me confused the most about persistence and if this is how it is intended to function.

*copy/paste*
well after a long night and morning of testing some ideas on the nature
of persistence here are my observations as of saturday morning.
*official servers with persistence on only*
loot does not despawn. seemingly ever. my stockpile has remained
safe and sound out in the forest since thursday morning. this is great
news for the survival players out there! but...this doesnt just mean the
loot you are stockpiling somewhere that seems to be safe from despawning
and server restarts. this seems to mean all loot. i tested my theory out
on a second server through 3 restarts yesterday and into the early morning
hours and noticed the same patterns. untouched loot is not despawning.
what this seems to indicate is if persistence is working as intended then
what we have here is a kind of "loot locked" server environment. in my
searches across 3 bases on 2 different servers the loot is not refreshing.
it is the same loot in the same spots as before after every restart.
if i notice any changes to loot in the areas that i patrol i will report it here.

current report as of sunday.

all persistent servers seems to be malfunctioning.
during yesterdays play time i did notice a
severe drop in server performance with restarts
taking 15-20 minutes when before it only took 1 minute.
all persistent servers are listed but with 0 pop and
refusing connection.

I cannot comment on whether or not the 'persistence' is working as intended or not because they have not told us exactly how it should work.

There is definitely a problem with the 'official' servers that have have persistence:on.

Many of them have 0/40 pop and are locked at 14:00 or 08:00.

If you try to join them you just sit on 'wait for host'

Im not going to upvote this because the title of the report is misleading. I don't know if the persistence is working correctly and neither do you. What we can say is that the persistence is causing some major issues with the servers. What you can do is upvote this for me cheers.

http://feedback.dayzgame.com/view.php?id=15738

upvoted for you chode...yes, what started out as
an item issue report has now become a widespread
server performance issue. i was going to change
the category but i do not think you can once you
report an issue...so it is stuck as items. no biggie.

i am including a link to my other report as it is basically an extension of this issue.

http://feedback.dayzgame.com/view.php?id=15947

10 days after reporting this and i have still not found a solution to why this is happening. this is mainly due to the fact that more and more servers are failing and i do not have time to check them all anymore.

no acknowledgement of the issue in the latest progress report other than, we will be wiping the servers once .49 goes to stable. i fail to see the reason why this would be considered a "solution".

i have included a screencap of all the servers that are seemingly dead. 0 populations and timers locked at xx:00.

if anyone has a link to information that i have missed regarding this issue please include it. honestly, i have reached my limits with this issue and this ticket process altogether and all i see happening once .49 hits stable is a repeat of these same issues because no fix was ever implemented.

Hi,
most of these problems should hopefully be solved by now, please create separate tickets if you encounter issues.
Thank you for the investigation!