What's going on with the servers?

[SpikedRocker]

Many, many people have been asking this exact question. What is with all the lag? There has been many threads about this all over our forum and no matter what it seems everyone is still confused. Well heres straight from the horse's mouth (or a Board of Directors).

The biggest question asked is what is causing all the lag. The short answer is a number of things have and are occuring to cause this. We are running on an older server and we all know with older computers tend have things just come up out of no where and cause crap. We did find out after the fact someone was running a buffer overflow exploit. That is a problem we've have experienced and apparently people still run it for kicks. Finally we've noticed our log keeping was huge amounts of information that really isn't necessary.

Another question is what are we doing about this problem. On Wednesday we shut down our servers to run a defrag on the dedi. Many of you noticed this and was made aware of it. This did help a bit in some servers and not so much in others. One thing we think that will make the biggest difference is moving our servers on to a new dedi. This is estimated to happen tomorrow. While doing this we will have fresh builds on our servers. In therory this should make everything like brand new. Once this is done if lag still exists we will have to re-evaluate the situation and come up with a new solution.

A few people have asked if there is any settings they can set on their side that would help and the honest answer is not much. But as always having your rate at 25000 helps with your choke.

Finally when do we expect things to be fixed. We hope things should start to get better on Friday. But with the fresh builds we'll be doing it might take a bit longer.

We apologize for the lag issues we've been having. Thank you for being patient and understanding we are working on the issues.

[Troy]

Ye, awfully laggy,servers have been emptier especially escape. Hope this fixes it thanks for updates :).

[Loganator456]

Thanks! I don't think I had too big of a problem, but I'm looking forward to seeing how the servers are tomorrow! :D

[TopCat]

Hope that will clear up tomorrow.

[Jack Napier]

Woop-woop!

[Caution]

well whatever you guys are doing is working. PB servers are now a LOT less laggy.

[Tcp-Kill]

Thanks spiked.

[Daze]

Thanks for the heads up.

[Irish Rebel]

Phew,thats a relief!
I hope the Escape servers are better too!

[Mercy]

Thanks and getting new dedis was a good idea, I'm sure that would fix the problem

[Henrik]

thanks i really hope it will help im so tired of the lag

[Toxin]

Hope that we have enough budget for the new dedi, we don't want to raise any Supporter or Admin prices, do we ? :dance:

Well, good luck whatever you guys are trying to do there. Hope the problem is getting fixed soon :)

[Metal]

finaly someone tells the story as it is thanks.

[Paul]

Hmm New dedi might mean more room for more servers :bigsmile:

Thanks spiked.

[Huwajux]

Thanks Spiked. I finally know what the hell is going on.

[Chobber]

Hope that we have enough budget for the new dedi, we don't want to raise any Supporter or Admin prices, do we ? :dance:

Well, good luck whatever you guys are trying to do there. Hope the problem is getting fixed soon :)

What you did not know is that when you subscriped as a supporter you also gave us your soul (and the money we need) for 6 more years..
So I guess we will be boosting the supporter packages with $400 pr. month?

And to spiked - THANK YOU, for finally making this clear for all!

[jigglebelljr]

Ye, awfully laggy,servers have been emptier especially escape. Hope this fixes it thanks for updates :).
Thanks spiked me and troy have been playing excape and we can't play with the lag thanks now we understand its prob going to take till sat i am playing right now on friday and it still lagging merry christmas\

spicked do you think the prices for admin and supporter will go up because of the new dedi i don't got in the budget lol just kidding

[LVG]

Thanks Spiked, Hope it works

[Suri]

Thanks spiked me and troy have been playing excape and we can't play with the lag thanks now we understand its prob going to take till sat i am playing right now on friday and it still lagging merry christmas\

spicked do you think the prices for admin and supporter will go up because of the new dedi i don't got in the budget lol just kidding

The Price on Supporter and Admin is not going to go up.

We really needed to find out all the information we could before saying anything to the community. We were trying everything we could before going to the option of new Dedi.

[Red]

Maybe you guys could get a bailout from the government to upgrade the servers.

[mNote]

Maybe our host is using alternative energy instead of burning fossil fuels to run our servers.

Shucks :(

[Periodik]

There are a few codecs available, there has been a new one lately set to default called sweex. This one should have about the same quality but less bandwidth. Try to add this in the server.cfg:


sv_voicecodec voice_speex //Set the voice codec
sv_voicequality 2 //Quality of voice, 1-5 where 1 is worst and 5 is best. 1 uses least bandwidth, 5 uses most


Also on a side note, every server above 32 players should be 33 tick, most likely will take away some lag too if you set that.

<19 = 100 tick max
<32 = 66 tick max
>32 = 33 tick max

[broncoty]

Will Zombie Hell be coming back?

[Loganator456]

Will Zombie Hell be coming back?Seriously. I love Zombie Hell, and I think ZH is much better than the Trikz server...It was pretty popular, too.

[bor3d]

Newer servers would definitely help. I mean this is a serious operation and the one thing with gaming servers is that you cannot go cheap. I talked to Haggard about this before, but I think he is sticking with his current provider :(.

[awesomebillfromdawsonvile]

Maybe you guys could get a bailout from the government to upgrade the servers.

Yes!!! demand a bailout goddamnit! i dont even own a truck and those fucks get cash y not SG?

[bor3d]

Enough with my smart ass comments, in all honesty I think there are a few things that need to happen here to make the servers perform optimally. Take these suggestions as they are and if people don't like them remember, THEY ARE SUGGESTIONS, and will not be happening unless someone else with higher authority (Haggard) approves this.

1. Getting new dedicated servers is a great idea, new hardware will definitely help, however we need to evaluate the amount of servers per boxes we have setup currently. I think we have too many servers and this is only my opinion. We need to either spread the love among more boxes or cut back on the servers we have by picking out the most popular servers and sticking with them. (Why the hell do we have so many L4D servers, that's just dumb).

2. This is just a personal preference, but I HATE Windows boxes. I have never had good experiences with Windows running my game servers. I am a Linux man myself and I think it's the best and most stable platform for running good servers. (Find some body with good Linux knowledge to set this up).

3. A new dedicated server provider is a must. I am not a fan of Wolf Servers. Prices are cheap and that's about it. I would much rather pay more for better quality. Also, let's get off this 10 mbit line and up it to 100mbit please.

That's all I have right now, but it is something to examine. If you don't like it, remember it's just my opinions. If you disagree we can discuss it. I am in vent or PM me.

- bor3d out!

[Periodik]

I know how to setup Source Servers on linux (on gentoo). I have done this before, but BD have ignore me :P

[Loganator456]

Wow, this is just getting fucking annoying. No offense, but something really needs to be done. Quick. I have a relatively low ping on the two Escape servers, and every single round I will lag out/mess up because of lag at least 15 times.

[MoreThanAPumpkinEater]

Thanks for the concern for the public and not just the private clicks.