ForEverQuest Server

[meeble]

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.

[Kammar]

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

[Zkhava]

lol, meeble, keep up the good work

[GundamGP02]

Originally Posted by 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.

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!

[meeble]

Originally Posted by GundamGP02

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

[Zkhava]

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

[hypershadow66]

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

[meeble]

Originally Posted by Zkhava

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

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

Originally Posted by hypershadow66

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

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.

[waternorth]

5 dollars says that the problem is with quests

[meeble]

Originally Posted by waternorth

5 dollars says that the problem is with quests

Hey waternorth, care to expound on this at all?

[cooter]

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:

if (RunQuery(query, MakeAnyLenString(&query, "SELECT petid, charname, accountname, lastgm, petitiontext, zone, urgency, charclass, charrace, charlevel, checkouts, unavailables, ischeckedout, senttime, gmtext FROM petitions ORDER BY senttime ASC LIMIT 0,15"), errbuf, &result))

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.

[zelgar]

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?

[meeble]

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!

Originally Posted by zelgar

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?

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!

[meeble]

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!

[Vasker88]

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

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

FTW