Best method of zone mgmt?
 

My server is anywhere from 5-40 people online at once...what's the best way to flucuate dynamic zones?

-Create multiple launchers and kill it to 0 zones in downtimes?
-Obviously you can add zones to a launcher, but taking them away it takes any zones...not just the empty ones
-Can you run multiple launchers? I usually get "not connected"

You can try making sense of this:
http://www.eqemulator.net/wiki/wikka...ServerLauncher

I only have 1 linux server configured atm, so I haven't tried my own advice of spreading the load.

But I think it comes down to running a world somewhere, pointing your 2 "zone" servers to that server as the traffic cop. Using EQLaunch [launchername] with the appropriately configured eqemu_config.xml file on each server, with the port ranges set and port forwarding configured of course.

And yes, you can have as many launchers as you want, I believe. I am running "Zones" and "Cities", the latter being static zones.

The best way I have found to manage my server was to give each expansion its own literal computer and make them all static. World and mysql share a computer and it seems to work fine here. I have had 70+ users on at one time with no problems.

I, too, take the static route. Just for grins & giggles, I launched all 290 (ish) zones staticly on a single computer. Started off with 2Gigs of physical ram, ended up diggin pretty deep into virtual memory.

As a comprimize, and since I run a slightly defferent than the norm EQEmu Network setup, I usually only have about 16-32 peeps on at any given time. I have trended the top 64 zones are the most frequently used and made them all static. Additionally, I run 2 dynamic zones per expected player equaling 64 dynamic. This is a tad overkill, but I like to plan for the 100% worst case player load scenario.

This is all handled by a single core single 1.8GHz cpu machine with 320 gigs HD and 2 gigs physical ram. While not spectacular performance, the load times of the static zones are acceptable.

What I have NOT done is load testing on the above setup with all 32 real players running a few groups of BOTs each... I am guessing that I would make my widdle cpu cry, but we will see :)

</tangent>

But in essence, thats how I handle my zones. I don't mess with Launchers much, but my whole system is time delay launched from a .bat file. I also administer the server via Remote Desktop Connection, so being able to double click a .bat, close RDC, wait 2 minutes and login is quite convienent way to restart my EQEmu. ;)

Ok, *ISSUE* I had with static zones.

I noticed when people zoned, their pets stayed behind as a NPC. Like SK_Pet64 and stuff. So eventually there is a lot of unneeded pets, and worse...if they had gear on them...you can kill them and get the gear.

I know this isn't actually related, but how do you guys get around this?

That's actually something I have not seen myself. I'll try it on the latest code and see if my pet refuses to follow in my static zones. If not, that's a bug for sure. ;)

They'd follow...

but in the old zone the pet would also stay put.