Hey All-
As you know, server crashes with EA made games are frequent. This morning we had Server 1 (Titan) and Server 2 (NS Mix) running with a good amount of players in each when... BLAMO - they both crashed around 11:45AM EDT this morning. Well, I have since sent in a support ticket to Wolf and have crossed my fingers that they may be able to help us. Here's a copy of the ticket:
Dear Support Staff:
We've been having multiple crashes on our dedicated server box (64.34.163.160). We have currently 4 BF 2142 servers running on that box and it's been nearly impossible to keep from having crashes. To add insult to injury, there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to when and/or why the servers crash. Needless to say, it's a bit frustrating.
Being the experts in this area we were hoping that you might be able to have a look at our settings and/or logs and share some insight into why this is happening and what measures we might take to prevent further crashes.
Thank you for your assistance!
UGC BS Watson
I'll post their response when I get it.
Watson
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Looking through the logs...
64.34.163.161 <- doesn't seem to be crashing... Or does it just not run often?
64.34.163.162 <- looks like there was a crash back on the 2nd but a lot of rounds got played before crash.
64.34.170.15 <- This one doesn't look bad with the amount of play time it's getting.
64.34.163.160 <- I do see that this one has crashed today.
Everytime we bring the crashing up to DICE they just say "it crashes"... they are not very supportive and give us stupid answers like this too often. Reading through the logs and for the amount of activity the last two servers in the list get that's really pretty good (unfortunately).
I've look through the performance trending and the server (resource wise) is doing really well. What you can experiment with is setting the CPU Affinity for each of the servers and see if that helps. Sometime is helped and others it hasn't. I'd try this with the more popular servers. Set one to CPU0 and the other to CPU2 or something to that effect and see if it crashes less often.
I wish we had a definate fix for this. We see that other providers (through our mailing list with DICE) are having these same issues. We keep hoping "the next patch" will resolve this but it hasn't completely yet...
Thank you for being a client! :)
Please be sure to respond in tickets not via email.
If you reply via email we might not get it.. ;-)
Thanks,
Rob (GiJoe) |
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Rob
I can't get the complete log for 64.34.163.161 but I know that it was up and running with a good number of people in it and died around noon today (same time as 163.160). Is it possible to have a "crash" without it showing up in the log? Where everyone gets dumped from the server but it doesn't actually crash?
While were on the topic of extremely wierd stuff: The other day 163.160 "crashed" and the server never restarted. I had to go into the CC and restart the server. Have you heard of that happening?
In your experience, do you feel that rebuilding the server would be advantageous - maybe updating punkbuster? Or do we just chalk this up to EA and Dice being completely inept?
Brian
"UGC BS Watson"
Perhaps EA and Dice should fix what they have already sold us instead of figuring out what piece of crap they're going to sell us next. Each successive release in the Battlefield franchise has been more trouble than the one before it.
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Hmmm... Not normally no. That sounds like something with GameSpy. When GS goes down or has a "hiccup" it can disconnect everyone from the server(s) they are one.
As for the server not restarting that is a strange one. The GCP will try to restart the game server twice if it's not responding via RCON. Not really had a problem with it in the year and a half we've been using it but I will look into it.
Can I do a restart of the server? Before going through and reinstalling let me go through and clean out all of the logs and update PB for each. It might take me about 20 minutes once I get started...
Just let us know when we can work on it. ;-)
I too wish they'd fix these things. 99% of the problems reported for Ranked servers are a problem we can't resolve. :-( It drives me INSANE to have clients with problems we can't fix.
Thank you for being a client! :)
Please be sure to respond in tickets not via email.
If you reply via email we might not get it.. ;-)
Thanks,
Rob (GiJoe) |
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Rob-
Anytime before 2:00pm (East Coast) is fine. I usually throw my guy in the server before going to work to see if we can get some action (it's actually been working most days). Just let me know which day you want to do it and I'll shut all the servers down in the morning.
By the way, we've been using Serverspy to display server stats on our website. Could that be contributing as well to the problem? If so, is there another provider that you could recommend to display the stats on our site? Truth be told, I'm not crazy about paying them $10 a month for the monitors.
Thanks again for all your help. I have to say that since coming to Wolf Servers (from Hypernia) we have been absolutely 100% satisfied with your company. I really appreciate the speed and efficiency at which you guys respond to support tickets and your dilligence in helping to make everything run smoothly!
Brian
"UGC BS Watson"