Any ideas on what's causing the server to crash so often these days, and when it's going to stop? :)

Just wondering... that's at least 3 or 4 times in the past couple of weeks, and I'm not on every day.

Godspeed, Delron

The problem was with the faction treasuries. This has been resolved. The latter half of the week, we have been running 24+ hours at a time, and I've had to manually reset. Last night, we did have a crash, but that may have had to do with me overloading things with a massive fire and battle.

Thanks Thrawn for clarifying that.

I have no problem with periodic resets (although the fewer of them necessary, the better), but I assume with resets that there's a message which goes out to everyone on the server and lets us know that the server is going to be reset, and giving us a bit of time to finish up whatever we're doing. (if people can be prevented from logging on when that happens, even better) The times I'm complaining about in this post seemed like crashes to me, since the server went down abruptly (no warning), and stayed down for long periods of time. It would be great if actual server crashes could be minimized. It's frustrating doing a quest or being in the middle of an good RP session and suddenly the server goes down. I have a limited amount of time to play, so that makes it even more frustrating when things like this happen.

May be a silly question, but isn't 24+ hours a relatively short time? Any reason the server can't run longer without a reset?

May be another silly question, but do you have logs in place to indicate what is actually causing the crashes? I would assume this is possible, somehow. Seems it would be a whole lot better than a bunch of crashes before someone figures out what's wrong.

Godspeed, Delron

Many popular servers crash 10+ times a day. Our server is very stable in comparison to most large NWN servers out there, although after the move we did have some issues with some specific things crashing the server.

Reseting once a day is good since it allows us to quickly put up changes that reflect the ever changing state of the mod (particularly in the last few days), as well as reset quests or any other issues.

Howland Many popular servers crash 10+ times a day. Our server is very stable in comparison to most large NWN servers out there, although after the move we did have some issues with some specific things crashing the server.

Congrats on keeping the server so stable, then... if you can make it even more stable, all the better!

Howland Reseting once a day is good since it allows us to quickly put up changes that reflect the ever changing state of the mod (particularly in the last few days), as well as reset quests or any other issues.

Godspeed, Delron

I'm assuming that's due to poor scripting and antiquated hardware, rather than a poor NWN server design?

Contrary to your belief, the instability of most servers eventually is caused by poor NWN server design. The multiplayer NWN server was never designed to support persistant worlds, much less -large- persistant worlds. Due to the way the server was programmed/designed, many community hackjobs have been done to make the server a more friendly environment, such as adding database support and useable abstract datastructures, but that of course is no replacement for a solid built in system. The other main problem simply boils down to the basic functions built into the server itself that are poorly constructed. Memory is not efficently used, and especially on windows platforms, is never -reused-, which is why you'll see a perfectly lagless server after a restart turn into a horrid laggy beast after 5+ hours. That's fine for small DM'ed campaigns, but it is not ideal for persistant worlds. These design flaws contribute to the multiple crashes you'll see on many servers.

Luckily, EfU has been able to overcome a lot of this because we have a very strong team of capable scripters that instead of pulling bloated packages off of the vault, have been able to implement streamlined efficent functions that exactally fulfill our requirements and nothing more. Even the server itself is a custom build, running on an optimized linux kernel.

And lastly, DM's will always let everyone know via a server message if for some reason there is going to be a planned reset. By no means do they sit around waiting for a completely random crash to occur and then go out laughing with their drinking buddies, except for maybe lado or illumnaughty.

Thank you for the very detailed response, ExileStrife.

Hats off to you guys for all you've been able to do with EfU. Being somewhat of a perfectionist myself, I'm always looking for ways things can be improved. :) I hope you don't take my comments as anything but doing just that. In fact, I've been telling the people on another server (through their forums) how well things are run here. I do like the environment there as well, but due to the lack of players there, I'm no longer enjoying spending time on that server. I'm hoping they might learn a thing or two about how to improve things, so it will be more enjoyable, and more people will play there too.

I do know where you could have gotten the impression of a lot of crashing. Since moving the server a couple weeks ago, we had two issues that could consistantly crash the server. Both of those have been removed.