Why does the server crash so much lately?

[Cannon]

The server is overloaded and is coughing blood when we have more than 70 players

When then server has too much to do it gets itself into a situation where the queue of messages from players is growing faster than the server is able to process them. These messages contain information like "Player XX has fired his gun at Player YY".

The average time to process messages in this queue is called the 'server load'. The normal server load should be 40-60 ms with occasional peaks at 140 ms. If the server load exceeds 5 seconds it is automatically restarted. This is happening a lot lately.

The solutions to this are :
1) Have fewer players.
2) Get a faster server.

As I've mentioned in another thread, the current server is temporary. The old server should be on site in the next couple of days (I'm watching the shipping company tracking system right now). Once the old server is reconnected, the server will be able to support 150-200 players again.

We are going to try and do this before next weekend.

Some time in the near future I'll be establishing theserver split thing to further improve the performance.

One interesting thing to note is how good our old hardware actually is for running Freelancer. The temporary stuff isn't fast but neither is it that slow. The old hardware out performs it by close to a factor of three.

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Proud member of "the most paranoid group of people in the community"

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