Hm, that is something that crossed my mind, but my machine is an AMD Athlon XP 2400 with 512MB DDR RAM. I'd have thought that it should be able to handle it. :/

I mean, I've also monitored the load on the server when there's been 5-10 people playing on it, and it doesn't seem to be a problem at all, so it's rather confusing.

Hmm, there's no word from the support guy yet, I'm going to try running the server again, but not run the extra zservers which may be a possible cause of the crash.

Okay, ForEverQuest is now back up and running. Please continue playing on it as normal, and I will be monitoring the load very closely. :)

sweet killer, thanks meeble

Hey Gundam, sorry I missed this post earlier, oops. Hmm, a friend of mine new to the server was just having this problem actually, with trying to enter Dalnir, so I set it up as a static zone for him, and then he was able to enter it. I wonder why this problem is occurring. :/

Anyway, for now, I've moved your character to PoK. I'm sorry for the problems.

Ya. that sounds like it should be able to handle it... How many zones do you have static and how many regular zones do u have open?

Well, I've only set one or two zones as static and about 18 as regular at the moment (though I'm actually soft rebooting right now and am going to try having lots more static zones instead of non-static ones to see if that helps the problem that people are having with getting disconnected when zoning.)

Of course, this would no doubt just cause even more memory to get eaten up so I don't know if it's the right step to take. :/ I'm going to look into optimizing MySQL, and see if that helps at all.

Hurah
 

Yay thankyou for a great server Meeble hoping that all works out ok =)

lol, meeble, keep up the good work :)

Thanks for the quick reply. Problem seems to still occur trying to get into PoK. Could it be a planar problem? I've had previous troubles zoning into planes before (whether it'd be old/new planes) and at least before I could manage to login after a few tries. Seems like this one is an iffy one now, doesn't want to let me in at all. Does my character data look ok? Seems to load up my character fine, and then afterwards it'll just keep on the zone load screen, keep playing music, after a while go back to the server screen. Nothing has changed since I last played normally, so I'm not quite sure what it might be. I guess I mind as well take a look at what might be wrong on this side.

Anyways, appreciate the reply, and if u get a chance to find out what might be wrong, I'm sure we'd all benefit from knowing. Thanks for your time!

Oh dear, how odd. ( Well, POK is set as a static zone on the server, and moving others with similar problems into there has worked before, so I'm not sure why it isn't working in this case. :/ I'll investigate for you, though.


In other news:

A little (important?!) announcement
Firstly, thank you to everyone who has given me ideas and suggestions, be it ingame, via PMs, or here in this thread. :)

However, unfortunately, there seems to be a few problems with my server on which ForEverQuest runs. I'm having lots of problems with things like server load, memory, and CPU usage, whilst the game is running.

For this reason, I'm currently making it my priority to sort out these problems, rather than continuing with implementing things in the game for the time being. As I already mentioned, the server crashed twice in the space of a few hours a couple of nights ago.

The thing is, a well as running ForEverQuest on my dedicated server, I'm also running a few websites, and CPanel/WHM. This may be the reason why so many resources are being eaten up so quickly by the server.

I initially thought my server would be able to handle running all this (It is an AMD Athlon XP 2400 with 512MB DDR RAM), but as I'm having to reboot daily to stop running out of memory, I'm going to spend a while trying to optimize things as much as I can to see if it improves things. The server load tends to be around 20-30+ when there are just 6 people in the game, and when there is someone using CPanel on the server at the same time.

I really don't want to have to scrap ForEverQuest so soon, as it really is something I'm very much wanting to run. Therefore, if optimizing things doesn't work, I'm going to look into upgrading to 1GB of RAM instead, although that would cost me an extra $15 a month on top of what I already pay, and since I'm not really the richest of people, that really is a last resort!

Please continue playing on the server as normal though, and just know that I'm currently busy with trying to ensure that everything is running smoothly, and that I have enough resources available for ForEverQuest to run for a long time to come! :)

I'll keep you guys updated. :)


Edit Ooh, ok, I have spent a couple of hours tweaking things and performance seems to be a bit better already, yay. Now to see what happens at peak time tonight though, when we get a few more people on the server :D

Hey meeble, its zekhava from server..... you have done a good job bro.... i dont care what anybody says.... your server is perfecto!


:D

ahh dont delete the server before i get a chance to play on it! it sounds like its 1 of the best servers on eqemu so once eqemu works with 7/16 patch then i wanna play it!! lol ok goobye

I'm glad you're enjoying the server, Zkhava. :) By the way, I'm not a "bro" :p Thanks for your PM as well. :)

Aw, don't worry, I have no intention of getting rid of the server at this point, but I'm just trying everything I can to iron out the issues we're having with it. :)

5 dollars says that the problem is with quests

Hey waternorth, care to expound on this at all? ;)

Meeble, are there tons of open petitions in your database?

When a zone boots up, it loads all the petitions from the database into memory. If you have a lot of petitions, this process can take a little while, sometimes causing zoning clients to think they're disconnected.

If this is your problem, there are two ways to go about rectifying it. 1. You could log on more and answer/delete those petitions often (a pain), or 2. Modify the function to load fewer petitions into the memory (much easier).

If you want to go with (2), here's your fix. zone/petitions.cpp, line 288ish, replace the "if (RunQuery ...)" line with this:

This code will load the 15 oldest petitions at a time instead of all 4 million of them. The only real downside of doing this is you'll have to delete these old petitions to see the newer ones, but realistically you should be doing that anyways.

(note that I wrote this for a 5.6 server so it's possible, but doubtful, that this may not work if you use a different version)

Hope this helps.

I created an Iksar on this server, and (finally) got it to not crash loading in the character. However, I am having a problem; I am not sitting/standing, and not not sit or stand. I am in a state of limbo, "You must be standing to forage.", and "You must be sitting to prepare your camp."

Any suggestions which I can do from my end?

Cooter, thanks so much for your suggestions. However, this doesn't seem to be the problem, as I only have 2 open petitions in my database. :/ I'll have to look at other solutions. Thanks for trying, though! :) It's very much appreciated!


Hmm, that seems quite odd, and I'm not sure if anyone else has come across this problem on my server before. I'll investigate for you though, and let you know once it's fixed. :) I'm not sure if there's anything you can do your end. Thanks for letting me know about this!

I thought I'd mention here that I'm upgrading the amount of RAM on my server. Whilst I doubt that this alone will stop all the problems with zoning and connecting and such, I do hope that it can help the ForEverQuest server somewhat. :) I'm still looking into ways in which the LD issues and such can be resolved.

I also thought I'd mention, whilst I'm here, that I've set up a little placeholder website at ForEverQuest.org. There is also a little PayPal donation button there, in case anyone is feeling generous and wants to help out towards server costs (which are currently paid in full by just me, at the moment!). :) Thanks!

Hope to see it up soon...The server is great :D

I was wondering if there could be some type of BoTb...i think that would be great 8)

FTW

Hi Meeble!

Looks like yur server's up and running again. I had a hunch maybe my EQ screwed up, so I tried logging on to other servers/playing to see if it would work. It has so far for every server I've tried, and yet I still can't log into yours. I can choose my character, but after that, it doesn't seem to load any farther. This would cause ppl to say that I've patched and doesn't work etc. but I can logon/play on other servers. Could it be the zone I am in (in Velks right now), or that my character information is corrupted? If you can shed any light on this, that'd be great, thx!

Edit/Add:
Well, good and bad news. Good news, is that I can log onto your server with a diff. char. I even tried zoning into velks with my new char to "open" the zone, and quickly logged off and logged back onto my main char and to still to no avail, it will not load my regular char. I was wondering if you could check my char data to see if it has been corrupted or something, or maybe something awkward is preventing me from being able to play with that char. Thanks.

Sometimes a character can get stuck in a zone wall or soemthing and disable it from being loaded... A #movechar should work fine for that problem.

Hey Gundam :)

Oh dear, I'll try moving your regular character into another zone and see if that helps. As Bloodgoth said, it could be that your character is stuck and cannot be loaded. I'll let you know once the move is complete!

Edit: Okay, I've moved your character "Itsuka" into PoK. :)

Right, the RAM has now been upgraded. I'm wondering if this helps at all with the problems we've had with crashes whilst zoning etc. Please could those of you who have been having problems try playing on the server again at some point to see if the upgrade has helped? If not, I'll look at alternative measures. :)

I'd really like to get this zoning/logging in problem sorted as soon as possible so I can really start work on customizing the server. :)

thx for the char move, but apparently that hasn't fixed the problem. It is just this specific char so I guess since we have done as much as we can to determine where the problem lies, could be my char data is simply corrupted. Would it be possible for me to make another one and have it modified back to the one I have now, or sumthing like that? Or do I need to start a new char from scratch? I'm not so much concerned about the gear, because that is all #si-able, but my levels had to be earned so that'll be a toughie. Please advise when you have time, thx!

Hey meeble you might wanna add the #movechar command...i have 3 chars stuck...one in the hole, arena, and oasis...It would help out alot...thanks

FTW

Some bugs I found were, 1) Pod lifts dont work 2) No usable skill trainers*that I could find anyway*3) Clickies that go in certain slots like ammo will show up as a combat effect and cant be used such as Bridles or drums 4) When in zones like Blackburrow or CB or any zone with lots of levels I ended up pulling things through walls and floors and ended up getting trained.

Thanks, userzero. :) Actually, most skill trainers are indeed working (or at least, they should be!), it's just a few in PoK which aren't. Thanks for the bug reports though :D

Right, a little announcement, now. I think this topic is getting a bit big now, so I went ahead and finally opened some forums for the ForEverQuest server. :)

http://forums.foreverquest.org

Please register if you have an interest in the server and it's development! :)

Hey just wanted to say hi,love the server so far gives me a break from WR when i dont want to raid and stuff,The reason im posting is because my rng is stuck in OOT could i plz get a Char move to oasis plz many thx's.

im gonna play on this server when i get my eqemu goin, its saying an error is occuring when im clickin log in to the server select, it sounds like a pretty uber server, ill check it out
~Klipz~

Eep, sorry I've been a bit quiet lately, but real life and other projects have been keeping be quite busy! I'll be continuining with development of the server as soon as I can, but I just thought I'd give you a heads up to let you know that ForEverQuest isn't dead! :p

Sithikus, you can actually use the #movechar command to move any characters on your account yourself! :)

Ello...I created a Dwarf Rogue to find out that Kaladim is not up and running. So I cant loggin on my rogue. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

I take that back. I can't get into any starting city right now. :shock:
Ah well. I will be okay. I will keep an eye on the forums to see how this server is progressing. Thanks!

Hi hidetada, thanks for checking out the server!

Oh dear, this zoning problem really is becoming a erm... real problem! What happened when you tried to connect to the starting zones, hidetada? Did you timeout, or did you get a "zone not available" mesage?

It's something that really needs to be sorted before we can progress any further, it seems. :/

(Oh, and thank you for your offer of help over on our forums, it's much appreciated! I'll get back to you about that soon. :))

I could get into Qeynos2 (North Qeynos). It was the only zone I could get into. I tried to move my character to Butcherblock Mountains. Also sometimes when I tried to move my character to another zone I would be at the character selection screen and it would say unknown zone. If I tried to connect to the unknown zone EQ would crash and the next time I would loggin it would say I was in the arena. Many of the starting city zones say this zone is unavailable. I could loggin to Kaladim but I had to logg off for a while and when I came back I couldn't. I got into East Cabilis with an Iskar but he was stuck and couldn't move but I used him to move my character. I created so many characters last night. One that I greated in Greater Faydark (pardon my spelling) was looping into a falling death where pain and suffering was hitting me for 32000. I had to close it out because I couldn't do anything else. I am also having items not sticking with my character. I have made summonitem hotkeys so that I can get them back fairly quickly. So by the time it was 2 am my time I was killin gaurds in Qeynos2 (which was nice exp I might add). I like the server. Keep up the good work. I can see why there are people that are lvl 65 by now. Anyway...I will play around today. My main is going to be Stabbit (female dwarf rogue). I hope to hear from you soon. I will keep posting the weird occurances that I find.

Everything is fine now...except I was working on equiping and I am guessing the server went down. Thats great though maybe that means some more fixes to problems. Well anyway...my rogue is lvl 51 now. I will be 65 by the end of next week I hope. Thanks for the great server!

As I mentioned over on our forums today, the ForEverQuest server is going on a hiatus. I'm not sure how long this will be for, but I don't have much time for the next 2 weeks or so to actively work on the server, so I don't see much point in continuining with things as they are (zoning problems etc).

Indeed, I am considering not bringing ForEverQuest back up 'properly' until it's a bit nearer 'completion'. As you know, this is intended to be a heavily customised server, although there hasn't been much customisation going on lately. ;)

I am indeed continuining active development on the server, and so when we're back up, please expect to see a nice new server with lots of custom features! :)

Apologies to our regular players (if we still have any left after weeks of zoning problems!), and I hope you all find new homes until ForEverQuest is completed. :)


I will be bringing ForEverQuest up again from time to time for testing purposes, so if you notice that it's up, and unlocked, please feel free to jump on and have a sneak peek at how the server is shaping up!

(Note: to the two of you I contacted about GM positions on the server, these are still available to you when the server is completed, should you still want to accept them).

I will be there when it comes back up ;). If I can will try to loggon when its only on for a short time. Good luck with it and keep us posted in the forums about it please. Thanks!