Vexxing Server Issues

Hi Guys,

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but hopefully it'll do. Please pardon the forthcoming wall of text... :smilewink: :music_whistling:

For several months I was hosting a DCS server successfully for occasional use for myself and some other players. I only start it up for those particular sessions.

Lately (the past couple months, roughly around the v2.5.6 change from 2.5.5 - though I'm not sure if that is causal or not), hosting it has become completely unreliable. Unfortunately I've been unable to determine what the problem is that is causing this.

I've tried everything I can think of (details momentarily), and I'm just about ready to sh*tcan the entire idea of hosting, so any insight you guys might have is pretty much my last hope before writing it off altogether.

OK, here is some detail:

Problem(s):

* During missions (any missions including a simple one I've included in my attachment), it will occasionally Freeze completely for several seconds (3+ minimum). This happens seemingly randomly afaict. It's not frequent, but it occurs with any/every mission we've tried at some point. All players are affected. Usually, it will behave normally again after the freeze.

* At other times, the Server will time out, and when I log into it, I see that the entire process puked and is gone. Unfortunately, there are no messages in the log that I can see to tell why it happened, at the time of the crash.

Server Info

This is a virtual (on Xen, iirc) dedicated server (in New York) that I rent (since 2013). On it, we normally host 3 RoF (Rise of Flight) game servers, and an IL-2 BoS (Battle of Stalingrad) server without any problems at all. Combined, those use ~25% of the CPU capacity and ~30-40% of available memory. These run 24/7 and do so for days/weeks at a time trouble free.

The games are hosted on a server account with Administrator privilege.

The server itself is a Xeon Class (E5-2697 @2.6 Ghz) platform with 8 cores, and 16 GB of memory. It is currently running Windows 2008 R2 / 64 bit OS. (I realize that OS is bit dated, and near, at, or maybe even past EoL, but everything on it is working fine, except DCS, and I'm not in a rush to redo the entire box yet to replace the OS if I can avoid it).

I've run Speedtest on it, and with a local NYC server, it gets 400+ MB/s both up and down. Pointed at a server in my area (~2500 miles away from NYC) it gets 200+ MB/s up and down.

In terms of player base, RoF is well past its heyday, so I can't recall the last time I saw more than 10-15 players logged in across all 3 servers and typically only 2-5 on the BoS servers.

For DCS, we've never had more than 5 on at any time.

So, given the low volume of players, and the physical stats I see on the server, I can't think of any reason for there to be problems with it -- especially considering the other hosted games run fine and DCS had also been ok until recently.

What I've tried - so far

* Shut down other programs and servers: Normally, even with the full compliment of games we're normally hosting, CPU is around 35%, and Memory is ~60-70% when adding DCS to the group.

With those other servers down, and just DCS running as the only hosted game, those numbers drop to about 20% CPU and 35-50% memory.

The freezes and crashes still continue. Even with just a single player on the DCS server (as happened today, in fact).

* Repaired DCS: I've done this several times, including today. Today's crashes happened with one person on, post patch, and after a repair, it happened again with two of us on. I'm including the dcs.log file of those sessions along with a copy of the mission that was running. For the record, I don't think they're related to today's patch as they've been occurring for the past month or two (previously, things seemed to be working fine).

* Set CPU Affinity / Priority: With 8 cores, I've also tried setting any other processes to use cores 0-4, and DCS to 5-7. That didn't solve it either.

I'm including a zip file that contains today's mission, the log files from today's two crashes, and the options and Serversettings files I'm using.

I'm hoping somebody can see whatever issue it is that I'm missing. At this point, I'm completely out of ideas, and I'm seriously considering uninstalling it from the server entirely.

Obviously, I'd much rather have the @#&*$ thing work properly (like the other games we're hosting), so I'm hoping this can be resolved successfully.

To quote a famous movie character ... "Help me Obi Wan, you're my only hope". :cry:

Regards,

4

SvrInfo-2020.zip

No advice at all ??? I guess that helps me prioritize this particular server in our list.

4

Bit of a long shot, but If cpu and memory are ok, it might be worth taking a look at disk performance.

I run my missions these days in the cloud, and early on when I used network storage I noticed pauses that we're correlated with spikes in disk activity. Throwing ram at the problem didn't help, the server seems to continue to access the disks irrespective of how much ram there is (I tried 128gb). I resolved by switching to local ssd storage instead of the network storage.