Server Restarts Required?

[MacThule]

I heard something recently about a bug that was forcing "most SM servers" to restart. I can't find that bug in the bug forum; how many servers out there are doing or have done re-starts within the past week due a bug of some kind?

 

[Az14el]

I make daily restarts on my own, and more populated servers usually restart every so many hours, several times a day.

It's more of a Java issue as far as i know, memory leaking, the game will take up more and more ram the longer the servers running to the point it affects performance and needs a restart to fix it. At least thats my understanding of it anyway.

Its what the "if you notice your game slowing down over time please send a report" message on the loading screen is about

 

[MacThule]

I make daily restarts on my own, and more populated servers usually restart every so many hours, several times a day.

It's more of a Java issue as far as i know, memory leaking, the game will take up more and more ram the longer the servers running to the point it affects performance and needs a restart to fix it. At least thats my understanding of it anyway.

Its what the "if you notice your game slowing down over time please send a report" message on the loading screen is about

i don't mean a re-set. i mean a wipe and restart of the database.

 

[Az14el]

oo right, understood, though a reset is where the universe is "reset", restart is essentially just restarting the program

A full server wipe & database reset is only needed if the server database gets too large to load efficiently, leading to lots of bugs & crashes that just gets worse & worse over time. Not sure if there's some ideal limit to database size where you reset it all (like maybe when server database size is larger than maximal memory).

 

[Valck]

i don't mean a re-set. i mean a wipe and restart of the database.

I think you may be confusing restart with reset, and thus raising a false alarm.

AFAICT most servers restart on a periodic basis, more or less daily or some other, relatively short interval. Few servers reset, if ever, and only on a need-to basis, i.e. if the world database gets corrupted, which is a generally rare occurrence, or if the player base/server management desires to "start over with a clean slate".

 

[MacThule]

I think you may be confusing restart with reset, and thus raising a false alarm.

AFAICT most servers restart on a periodic basis, more or less daily or some other, relatively short interval. Few servers reset, if ever, and only on a need-to basis, i.e. if the world database gets corrupted, which is a generally rare occurrence, or if the player base/server management desires to "start over with a clean slate".

i mean... restarting the whole universe. from the Start. other than importing some sectors or whatever.

so... beyond semantics... is there or has there very recently been a bug that has forced servers to reset/restart/wipe based on advisement from Schine, or is this just a rumor?
[DOUBLEPOST=1462097688,1462097649][/DOUBLEPOST]

i mean... restarting the whole universe. from the Start. other than importing some sectors or whatever.

so... beyond semantics... is there or has there very recently been a bug that has forced servers to reset/restart/wipe based on advisement from Schine, or is this just a rumor?

i'm only interested in if the rumor is true

 

[Aynslei]

i mean... restarting the whole universe. from the Start. other than importing some sectors or whatever.

so... beyond semantics... is there or has there very recently been a bug that has forced servers to reset/restart/wipe based on advisement from Schine, or is this just a rumor?
[DOUBLEPOST=1462097688,1462097649][/DOUBLEPOST]

i'm only interested in if the rumor is true

This has happened in the past, both in this game and in other games. Such is the nature of games in development, exploits are found and abused, crippling bugs can cause lasting issues, and major changes might require things to be reloaded fresh.

I am uncertain if there are any current issues of the like but one such issue existed with the first updates involving the shipyards. To which any server that did not reset after the issue was fixed I considered a trash server handled by badmins.

These things will happen, I am really curious about the coy nature of you asking about it though.

 

[Master_Artificer]

NFD, as I am told by FlyingDebris , needs to wipe the blueprint database every so often because it is, well, a build server, and people make a lot of blueprints.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Yep, we do. The way the catalog is set up causes massive lag whenever you do anything relating to ship spawning or blueprints.

 

[therimmer96]

There is many reasons to reset the server database

As you explore stations, and build ships, find planets and such, the database gets bigger. Because there is zero compression on the save files and they have to save 3 bytes of data for the millions of blocks, plus meta data and weapon/logic links, the database takes up alot of space. I have a backup of the Elwyn database that is over 300gb big.

As a database gets larger, it takes longer for it to start up. The database folder consists of millions of small files, all of which need to be discovered and loaded into the database at start up. This takes even longer after a crash, as the database wasn't saved correctly. It was possible for the elwyn database to take 30 minutes to start after a crash, and 15 after a proper shutdown, not counting the time needed to actually shutdown properly.

Then you get to the ingame effects-

• Planets being eaten in and around spawn sectors, forcing players ever further away from spawn.
• Lag, from players having massive structures, and either staying near these structures, or other players stumbling across them.
• The game gets easier and duller towards the end game, so resetting will allow everyone to experience the start again, and bring everyone back to equal ground.
• Entities in sectors used to be corruptible, resulting in logging in crashing the server. The only way to find these sectors so they can be wiped was to ask players where they are, or try running /player_info for the short amount of time before them spawning, and the sever crashing. If you get too many of these sectors, you need to do a reset. I have no idea if this is still possible, but I've not experienced it.
  
• As the game gets new naturally spawning objects, these start to appear further and further away from the center of the spawn point, so players are less likely to join simply because they want to experience the new features of the game.
• Simple clean up. Lots of people accumulate lots and lots of things like cores and ships they no longer use. A reset is the best way to remove these. This is the reason I suggested the NFD reset.

Lots and lots and lots and lots of reasons.

 

[MacThule]

thanks all. i appreciate the responses but i thought i'd made it clear in the OP that i was asking a very specific question about whether there was a current bug within the week preceding me posting the OP that was causing most or all servers to perform a restart under recommendation from Schine.

reason being, a server i was on did a restart under on that premise during that time frame, and though many factions had their sectors ported over, a few seem to have had their HB protection selectively removed and were immediately attacked by a player with a background of admin abuse on another server.

i am trying to verify the admin's restart premise because by the time it was done it seemed a lot like an cover for gutting a few select players and after looking i've seen no discussion here of the bug the admins were supposedly being "forced" to re-start to correct because as they put it 'all servers' have been recommended to restart because of this.

from the vague responses i'm gathering that there was no such bug last week creating some acute problem that forced a bunch of servers to be restart/reset their universes clean. thanks all!

 

[Megacrafter127]

Because there is zero compression on the save files and they have to save 3 bytes of data for the millions of blocks

false, there is compression, although for easy random access it is done in chunks. each segment [16x16x16 blocks, or 12288 bytes raw blockdata] takes up exactly 5120 bytes. Other metadata(like connections) are not compressed though.

 

[Erth Paradine]

I'm going to make a leap of faith, and assume this is all about us; that MacThule was talking about our recent world reset.

The "serious bug" we're referring to is T1385 (yes I know the link says 404, but I'm told the ticket is still open). Although I don't recall ever saying that specific bug requires a world reset. The bug does without a doubt affect all servers though. What we did pass along , mostly to take advantage of the audience's attention, was a recommendation to logout away from valued entities, and a stern anti-exploit warning. This recommendation still stands, as the exploit remains unresolved.

Our server reset was done primarily to address increasing unexplained instability, the final straws were oddities from the most recent update, and a still unexplained reset of our server's .seed: invisible suns were burning pilots alive, missing suns were suddenly warping pilots across the galaxy. We also know of at least three player-owned stations that simply disappeared during the final few daily restarts; leaving ships docked to invisible entities, and a time-consuming headache for admins to correct. The server itself was crashing multiple times per day, with causes consistently attributed to bug reports that have since been confirmed by Schine testers. Since the migration, our server has crashed once, due to another new bug that Schine testers have confirmed affects all servers.


During migrations, two failed due to nearly "fubared sectors" that could only be successfully exported by an admin manually visiting (empty), leaving (and waiting until unload), and returning (entities now appeared), and of-course a forced-save. Many pilots were also frustrated with the change in their background, due to the differing server seed (and attempts to replace/restore from backup just kept changing the seed).


To dispel an apparent misconception: I know of no way to maintain homebase protection or sector control during an export/import, and our queries to Schine staff also returned the same understanding.

This is why I personally invested two days into research and evaluation of our migration options, initiating the development of an HSQL tie-in for our server, kicking off a perl implementation of StarNet.jar, and putting into production a web-based sector migration tool that has since successfully migrated 47 sectors, and remains available for additional requests during the next few weeks. Simply because world resets are an unpleasant reality, and we'd like to eventually have a persistent universe, so its in our favor to mitigate the negative effects of a reset.

Further, you mentioned concerns of players losing assets during migrations: I know of at least two major migration hiccups. One was your sector, which simply couldn't be imported until nearby sectors unloaded (and given your proximity to spawn, that took a while), then there was the pilot affected by fubared sectors. Both issues have since been resolved. In the meantime, no players lost credits, faction points, blueprints, or faction assignments. If our intent was malicious, it would have been far easier to make up excuses and scuttle credits, points, blueprints, etc, or to have simply not offered a migration option at all.

If you still know of pilots encountering difficulties, please have them reach out via our forums support board, or try catching an admin in-game, we're here to help.

 

[MacThule]

thanks for getting that sorted, Erth.

somewhere after the 24-hour mark... after you saying that the delay was my fault for being online for 15 minutes to see if things had changed, after waiting offline a full day... i assumed it wasn't going to happen. especially seeing how a couple days earlier on the server forum you announced that you would be implementing a station near spawn doing exactly what my station at spawn was already doing, something no one really does (i know the station was ugly, but i would have accepted changes).

and none of the other spawn-adjacent bases within sight of mine were randomly shot up at the same time. none of your warp-gates or the public factory. just mine. and Spocklin's.

both of us had beef with the admins at SS in the near past... one of those being the very individual (formerly Napther, who started on your server as Napther then pretty openly changed his name to whatever it is now) who was on immediately after the reset and destroyed Spocklin's Home Base with a ship.

your server launched coincident to SS beginning to bleed out over chronic admin abuse a couple months ago.
your account joined these forums just (maybe a month?) before that launch.

at least 2 of the badmins from SS were alts for the owners of that server. a server with a then-private back-end.

at least one of those was a former admin from the late Arctic Gaming, which suffered a similar malaise.

specifically; admins serially and frequently finding thin grounds for removing a player's HB protection, without warning, and having some lulz by using a ship to blow it up, or a ship flown by a non-admin friend or non-admin alt for greater plausibility. rather than deleting the supposedly offending structures, as most admins would do an entity in violation of rules...

the timing of your server launch and coincident appearance in the forums, stack poorly with a seemingly uncalled for re-start that resulted in two individuals having their HB protection removed and their bases subsequently attacked.

a thin premise resulting in HB revocation/suspension and rapidly subsequent HB direct attack. it's the exact M.O..

affecting two players who spoke out against similar abuses on the server yours seems to be replacing.

i administered a plain old forum for several years - back in the 90s. one thing there was never a lack of was canny, persistent trolls. some of them, the cleverest ones, would season "sleeper" alts months in advance then we'd start seeing pattern behaviors suddenly erupt from these mostly-inactive, older accounts. in a digital environment, there are a million ways one can pretend to be something or someone one is not. the more RL economic resources one has, the more difficult to pin down online. based on my experience, i don't generally like to make accusations in an online environment like this because there's no way to prove who or what anyone is or what their connections are. pattern behaviors are like fingerprints though. names, avatars, sub-venues don't cover those very well. clear confirmation is not required to take action when one perceives an underlying pattern.

so the bug is 404? see, that totally sucks man... this may be just a bad coincidence for you then, but you can see my predicament. from the perspective of experienced players who have been dealing with the badmin/trollowner shenanigans on SS, the event was awfully bad on multiple levels.

i do appreciate your efforts at remedying it though, and wish you the best of luck with your new server. and, since you're pretty new as well - welcome to Starmade!
:D

 

[SmilingDemon]

MacThule .. the linked report returns a 404 because it is an exploit that was set to private for the reason of being an exploit. Its still an open bug report ticket and not lost or something like that.

 

[Erth Paradine]

thanks for getting that sorted, Erth.

somewhere after the 24-hour mark... after you saying that the delay was my fault for being online for 15 minutes to see if things had changed, after waiting offline a full day... i assumed it wasn't going to happen. especially seeing how a couple days earlier on the server forum you announced that you would be implementing a station near spawn doing exactly what my station at spawn was already doing, something no one really does (i know the station was ugly, but i would have accepted changes).

and none of the other spawn-adjacent bases within sight of mine were randomly shot up at the same time. none of your warp-gates or the public factory. just mine. and Spocklin's.

Spocklin's issues have already been settled to his satisfaction, and I'm not aware of any other stations being shot-up. As I've said before, please have these "other" pilots reach out to us via our support forums. Please...my crystal ball just isn't that good.

As for yours, as you and I already discussed, we imported your station at the same time as spawn's import, before permitting pilots back onto the server (to work around the delayed-import issue that occurred later). Unfortunately, I was not fast enough in protecting all of spawn's surrounding sectors before pirates spawned and took liberties on your unshielded station. Of course I've already told you this, and after you and I discussed this, with your approval, we removed your damaged station and set it for re-import. As for blaming you for delays, no. What I did do, for about the 6th time that day, was point out that you and other pilots were idling at (or near) spawn and that was preventing your sector from being re-imported. Period.

As for "other stations" within range of spawn, there were, and still remain, no other stations near spawn.

I also have no idea what you're talking about regarding taking over player-run roles. Aside from the modest docking ring, a few "admin run" warpgates, and spawn's shop, all of which existed prior to your arrival, our intent is to delegate as many in-game activities as possible. These goals are open for discussion at all times on our forums; admins are abundantly happy to hand over roles when responsible pilots are ready, willing & able to take them on.

both of us had beef with the admins at SS in the near past... one of those being the very individual (formerly Napther, who started on your server as Napther then pretty openly changed his name to whatever it is now) who was on immediately after the reset and destroyed Spocklin's Home Base with a ship.

your server launched coincident to SS beginning to bleed out over chronic admin abuse a couple months ago.
your account joined these forums just (maybe a month?) before that launch.

at least 2 of the badmins from SS were alts for the owners of that server. a server with a then-private back-end.

at least one of those was a former admin from the late Arctic Gaming, which suffered a similar malaise.

specifically; admins serially and frequently finding thin grounds for removing a player's HB protection, without warning, and having some lulz by using a ship to blow it up, or a ship flown by a non-admin friend or non-admin alt for greater plausibility. rather than deleting the supposedly offending structures, as most admins would do an entity in violation of rules...

the timing of your server launch and coincident appearance in the forums, stack poorly with a seemingly uncalled for re-start that resulted in two individuals having their HB protection removed and their bases subsequently attacked.

a thin premise resulting in HB revocation/suspension and rapidly subsequent HB direct attack. it's the exact M.O..

affecting two players who spoke out against similar abuses on the server yours seems to be replacing.

I honestly couldn't care less about drama from SS admins, or any other server for that matter. Those pilots don't have admin on our server, which puts them at the same level as you rights-wise. Further, our griefing related rules are clear: we will enforce those rules, but we do also need your help catching bad pilots. We need proof of griefing, and we will intervene when the evidence is clear.

But let me be clear here: Admins are NOT god, we simply hold that role because we can't give it out to everyone, and someone has to help out from time-to-time.

Regarding a history of other admins revoking HB protection, AFAIK removal of homebase protection is NOT something that even admins can do directly. In fact, the way to remove HM protections is through removal of faction points. You seem to have a history of misunderstanding game mechanics/functions and making unfounded accusations in that regard. Aside from that, I kindly ask that you not broadly stroke all admins with the same brush. I call the bad ones griefmins, as those kinds of admins kill servers; they absolutely will not be tolerated in our universe - as nothing good ever comes from that.

i administered a plain old forum for several years - back in the 90s. one thing there was never a lack of was canny, persistent trolls. some of them, the cleverest ones, would season "sleeper" alts months in advance then we'd start seeing pattern behaviors suddenly erupt from these mostly-inactive, older accounts. in a digital environment, there are a million ways one can pretend to be something or someone one is not. the more RL economic resources one has, the more difficult to pin down online. based on my experience, i don't generally like to make accusations in an online environment like this because there's no way to prove who or what anyone is or what their connections are. pattern behaviors are like fingerprints though. names, avatars, sub-venues don't cover those very well. clear confirmation is not required to take action when one perceives an underlying pattern.

If you have a fundamental trust issue, then I fail to see how anything any admin does is going to gain your trust - unless everything always works perfectly, on your timelines, and in your favor. Sadly, we are in-fact working with alpha-grade software, sometimes s*&$ happens for inexplicable reasons. In my opinion, proof of a good admin is when they've invested as many resources as reasonably possible, in helping others recover from unintended game bugs/mechanics. If our efforts remain insufficient, and if you cannot put down the broad brush, extend some trust, and accept that despite best intentions things might not always go as planned, nor in your favor nor on your timelines, then please don't come back to our universe. Please; I would rather expend my energies on those that appreciate it.

As for my history, do you Google? My main is ErthParadine, my alts are FireParadine, WaterParadine, and Waldo. The first two alts are used mostly for internal testing and dual-boxing, and I've disclosed those names on my introduction page in the forums. The last alt I picked up to add a little humor during one of many recent 6-8 hour long troubleshooting/documentation/testing sessions with Schine staff. Admins of the high-ranking servers can check their logs to confirm my asseritons - although I presume most are not going to get into that silliness.

so the bug is 404? see, that totally sucks man... this may be just a bad coincidence for you then, but you can see my predicament. from the perspective of experienced players who have been dealing with the badmin/trollowner shenanigans on SS, the event was awfully bad on multiple levels.

As I've told others that I have pressed me for details on this exploit, you'll just have to extend a little trust for now. The truth will speak for itself in due time. If you can't do that, well, history will show who the fool is soon enough.

i do appreciate your efforts at remedying it though, and wish you the best of luck with your new server. and, since you're pretty new as well - welcome to Starmade!
:D

New? No. Been lurking for quite some time. Started our own server because it's just the right time to dip into that.