Server hanging during client connect

[messiahua 0]

Hello to everyone reading this thread.

My community suffers from a dedicated server problem for a long time and I can't find any solution. We have recently upgraded our hardware and it's a decent configuration: xeon e3-1240, 4Gb RAM running windows with 100 mbit net link - that's more then enough for arma.

Usually there are less then 40 players on server and everything runs pretty much fine without problems, but recently we had a joint game session with ~60 players and that's when problem start to appear:

Mission is selected by admin, everybody start to join on slot selection screen and at some point game stops responding to any in-game commands or actions (you can't change your role for example, as well as issue any admin commands), and everyone, who was connecting to server is hanging on "wait for host" screen, but when someone (exact person) disconnects - server starts processing, suddenly everyone connects and all goes smooth until the same person or similar starts to join.

Personally I think, that's arma related problem (bad net coding) between server and problematic client (low upload/download bandwidth or whatever) and you can't do anything about it, BUT there are a lot of other public/private servers, that host more then 60 players (up to 100) without such problem! And that's nonsense in any case, why one clients messes all server?

There are a lot of different guesses on the source, but no exact solution and it is very hard to find it, because it is not possible to gather this amount of players just for the sake of testing (everyone wants to play obviously).

It couldn't be because of any arma server network settings (by the way they were on default), because the game hasn't even started yet, everyone just connects! And it couldn't be a problem with hardware, because it's new and we had same problem on old. I very doubt that's any network bandwidth issue, because almost no data transfered during this problem and I witnessed at least 60mbit upload without problems when server was sending mission file. It's not CPU, because there is almost no load during problem. It feels like messed up internal arma server processing code. It is waiting for some data or other timeout to happen.

I beg for any help! Probably someone also faced this problem and found some solution.

Edited October 23, 2011 by MessiahUA

[Gunter Severloh 4051]

Hi,

Never heard of such a problem, but all I can say is check your server's RPt before and after you get the

problem as it should list those persons, and possibly give some information on what could be causing the issue.

What missions are you running btw?

[messiahua 0]

but all I can say is check your server's RPt before and after you get the

problem as it should list those persons

I will save RPT next time. I was looking through it during problem and it contained some usual and not so usual errors, but anyways they make no sense to non-developer.

What missions are you running btw?

All missions are custom made and it really doesn't matter, because the problem on role selection screen, mission hasn't been started.

Edited October 23, 2011 by MessiahUA

[.kju 3244]

Do you run a window or linux Server Messiah?

I think to recall ShackTac to have problems along these lines.

Not sure if already for the lobby - maybe they had only with JIP.

But it might be worth to ask them about it.

[messiahua 0]

Do you run a window or linux Server Messiah?

Windows as I wrote in my first post. By the way we played with shacktac not so long ago on their server and I don't recall such problem at all, even considering long distance (thus worse connection) between players, but I will ask nevertheless.

[.kju 3244]

They had the problems during a1 times.

RPT from both clients and server is a starting point too.

PS: Sorry somehow I missed windows - I even used the browser search..

[hellfire257 3]

The mission at slot selection can cause things to go FUBAR. I've seen a mission causing a server FPS of 20 in the lobby (when not started) when in every other mission it's 50.

And the best thing? I don't have a clue why! :D

[messiahua 0]

That's one hell of a problem indeed and I'm more and more confident in the fact, that's some kind of bug in dedicated server application itself. It would be great to have a dev comment on this for at least some clue on what could be wrong and a way to provide useful feedback (rpt, netlog, any other config setting) to find the source and fix it.

Edited October 24, 2011 by MessiahUA

[.kju 3244]

Post in the CIT, if you want to get BI devs to look at it.

[Gunter Severloh 4051]

As said Post your RPT lets start there, and if theres nothing we can do then report it.

[dslyecxi 23]

Hey Messiah,

We ran into this issue in ArmA1 awhile back. Our solution was to do our session joining in what we call a "Join in progress presession mission". This is basically just a simple, zero-frills mission which has sufficient slots for our anticipated turnout. People start connecting to this ~15 or more minutes before the session actually starts, and join all the way into the mission (which is just people messing around in-game). Once we are at the real 'start time' for the session, we go back to the mission select screen, pick the real first mission of the night, slot in, and start from there. This prevents the sort of hang-on-connecting issues that happen if you "dry" slot into a mission with many clients connecting in a short period of time.