Question about [PEQ] The Grand Creation

[Pinedepain]

Hey guys, i'm just wondering why sometimes this server is locked :( i'm asking that because i like to play on it and i was just wondering how long it can be down and what for?

Thx bud !

[wize_one]

FatherNitwit and the team have been trying to track down why some of the zones are running wild and eating all the system resources.

we are sorry for all the downtime lately 8(

hopefully when the cause is found everything will be back up like normal.

[Pinedepain]

Okay, thx :)

Good luck on fixing the problems

[sotonin]

The answer is simple yet very often overlooked.

Welcome to the ProjectEQ Database TEST SERVER(classic/velious *TEST*)

We use a 24/7 dedicated machine. But we do have downtime to better improve the emulator and correct things.

[govtcheeze]

Just to expand on this a little bit...

We use collected data from live servers to create as close to a live-like server as possible. All previous releases of the non-peq DB were good, but far from complete. When we loaded up the Velious test database information, some major code-based inefficencies (spelling!) were discovered which caused the zones to become unplayable. CPU usage would go up to 100% sometimes making the whole server useless. This is due to the massive amounts of npcs in the zones and their casting abilities.

FNW and the team has been pinpointing the causes of the cpu usage, and working to get this as low as possible. The team has corrected almost all of the known areas of problems (quite creative fixes, but very un-obvious until the velious zones came out) and we have unlocked the server for use again. A few zones still need to be fixed and are currently locked, but overall this will be a HUGE benefit to the cvs code. As it stands, static zones now use between 1-3% cpu on our machine, compared the 10-20% what is used to run at. That means more players can raid, and more mobs / quests can be added to each zone.

[Pinedepain]

PEQ server crashed :(
Does an admin know when he will be back up plz? :)
Thx !

[sotonin]

PEQ didn't crash it was taken down. We're leaving it down to test server stability. It only seems to lock up when the emu is running. If it keeps it up like this, i may just bring it down. I don't want this hunk of junk tearing apart my server, not worth it. There's a massive memleak in zone, so it's already eating away at ram nonstop and never clearing it. It has issues ( Hope somebody can target the memleak issue and fix it.

[sdabbs65]

PEQ didn't crash it was taken down. We're leaving it down to test server stability. It only seems to lock up when the emu is running. If it keeps it up like this, i may just bring it down. I don't want this hunk of junk tearing apart my server, not worth it. There's a massive memleak in zone, so it's already eating away at ram nonstop and never clearing it. It has issues ( Hope somebody can target the memleak issue and fix it.

Hmm anything to do with this...
quote"We've had new 1gig ram modules installed, the previous were having issues."

you know your server better than me but im guessing it's something more than just zone.exe.
the added VEL NPC's I heard was the main problem. now it's zone
interesting...
Im just wondering if the NPCs caused the memory leak..
or is it a code issue of not being able to handle them.
im no expert in either but im running PEQ old kurnak with no issues yet except lack of quest that im constantly working on.

[Pinedepain]

Any idea of when the PEQ server will be back up please? I wanna play :D

[RangerDown]

Unfortunately the resource leak is a pretty bad one. Bad enough that a few times it's brought the ENTIRE server itself (not just the emu part -- the whole darn machine) to its knees, requiring the datacenter to reboot it.

Add to this, that Sotonin uses that server for other things as well -- possibly his work, or so on. So there's only so long he's gonna tolerate a leaky emu running on a server he needs for RL stuff too :(

[sotonin]

Yes indeed the leak is a source issue of "some" sort. You can literally watch the zone's memory usage tick away increasing before you eyes. it's crazy.

We in fact reduced from the 120ish statics down to 25 statics and 25 dynamics, and it still does it. Just takes a bit longer. (Note, we used to run all the statics with no trouble)

So it's something fairly recent in the code and something very severe. Yes i do web-design for money on the side, so i can't have my server dying on my because of this. so until the leak is fixed the server will probably remain offline.

[Pinedepain]

Ok guys, good luck on fixing the problems

[RangerDown]

I'm gonna look into setting ulimits on the zoneservers. In plain English, that means that the Unix OS can enforce limits on how much CPU time or how much memory a process can use. After the process exceeds its CPU time, it's forced to close. If it goes over the memory limit and asks for more, the OS tell the process it's gotten enough and won't get anymore.

This won't fix the memleak, and it DOES mean that you might be in a zone and have it crash on you cuz it went over its limit... but at least it won't crash the whole server. On the upside, it might make it easier to trace where it's leaking memory cuz it'll crash on a memory allocation attempt.

[mysticalninjajesus]

ok heres the solution.. you just make the peq server with classic only since thars no memory leaks there right? lol you take out #zone and add old world quests and just use a home computer for the velious tests..

[RangerDown]

no no no

The fact you're seeing it on Velious is coincidence. (I think :D) Something somewhere in the code has changed recently, right around when we started Velious.

Currently there are a couple of Kunark zones, and maybe even old world zones, that we've locked off as well because they're problematic. The pattern seems to be zones with lots of NPC's -- and more specifically -- lots of moving NPC's.

Plane of Growth, Trakanon's Teeth, North Qeynos... my lag-o-meter shoots into 5000+ when I go to these zones, and as soon as I zoned into Plane of Growth one evening Sotonin and Fathernitwit pretty much went "Holy Shit!" on IRC... :lol: