Planned downtime: Account format migration

[TeckXKnight]

makes informative possibly helpful post, gets called out, proves them wrong & gloats slightly, gets called retard and asshole even by mods.

great community here :lol:

Ya, there's no point in lying and sugarcoating it won't help. He was aggravating the situation and I'd like to diffuse it. Handing out a warning or ban sure as heck isn't. Being as honest as possible would, so I told him he was acting like an asshole. If you'd like a dissemination of the words he used that set the stage for that I can happily provide them, but I'm not even sure that's necessary. Did you not see the memes he was using?

[loftar]

There, running again.

[BallisticMeat]

There, running again.

Pras

[TeckXKnight]

There, running again.

Thanks loftar~! =)

[overtyped]

There, running again.

LOOKS LIKE NO SLEEP FOR ME TONIGHT.

[Moyah]

Loftar you're awesome. Thank you so much for all the work, updates, and dealing with the addicts. I'm sure there are hundreds of others who agree.

[TeckXKnight]

There, running again.

LOOKS LIKE NO SLEEP FOR ME TONIGHT.

I'd say try not to die but I think all words are lost on you. Have fun at least. =)

[Serejai]

A game like this causes a LOT of strain on the hard drive because of all the read/write data it requires to update tiles.

It's not as if the changing of a tile translates to a hard drive IOP, however. The tiles, as well as all other data, are kept entirely in memory and only saved back to disk when the map area is being unloaded. The same can be said for most, if not all, other actions that can be performed by players. Haven doesn't actually use that much disk I/O at all.

Personally I would go with a Xeon minimum (and if they're using an i7 that would be one of the causes of random lag spikes) but overall the I/O is the bottleneck for a server like this and a 7200RPM HDD just doesn't cut it.

It doesn't? Since the BSDDB patch and kernel upgrade, I think the server has been handling exceptionally well. There has been virtually no server-side lag even with 1400+ players continuously online, and no sign of near contention, either.

Now, I don't know which specific hosting package is being used... but the lowest one comes with 16GB of RAM which should be adequate to run this server (although 32GB would be better) and an i7.

For the record, the hosting package we ordered isn't on the site any longer. The server has 12 GB of RAM and an i7 920.

On the other hand, it should be noted that Hetzner has previously been reusing used hard drives when replacing crashed ones. I don't quite know what to think about that, because there really is no reason to just assume that they are bad (they could have come from decommissioned servers or other harmless uses), and I can certainly see that it would be a pointless expense from their side to buy entirely new disks every time they build a new server or any time someone complains of dubious troubles with their hard drives. On the other hand, it's not as if they couldn't be bad, either. It's a good question whether the failures have been caused by the hard drives being latently bad or if there's something I'm doing.

On the other hand, I did notice that they have now added an option to have a completely new drive inserted instead, but at cost. I perused that option for one of these replacements, and the other disk also happened to be completely new (even though I hadn't requested it), so the server is, at least, now finally running on new disks. Let's hope that has an effect.

Either way, I can't really see that there's anything in particular that I would be doing that should be especially strenuous on the drives. Once this is all over and dealt with, I do plan to file a complaint with Hetzner about the horrible MTBF exhibited thus far (6 drives in less than 3 years is hard to ignore), but I would like to take this opportunity to mention that, apart from the disks, I have enjoyed Hetzner quite a lot. They're very "hands-off", their network works well, their support crew is reasonable and quite accommodating, their automatic management options are very nice, and their quite cheap for all that; so if I were to change providers, I don't really know to what.

So you're basically saving all tile actions to memory... but when you have thousands of players online and each is randomly unloading map segments that need to be saved to a physical drive, that's still a lot going on. The Minecraft save system is pretty much the same way; block changes are saved into memory and when the chunk (64x64x256) is unloaded it writes to disk. This works great when people are staying in one spot and building something but if everyone on the server starts to explore or something at the same time our disks would crash or lock up. I can easily see the same situation play out with Haven; although to a much lesser extent since there is no Z axis to worry about. Normally a refurbished or used hard drive should be fine but perhaps, combined with map saving, it could be pushing them over their limit.

I'm not sure what you're saying in regards to no server side lag recently. My group has been experiencing rubber banding quite often this past week; usually around the time when Russians/Eastern Europeans begin to log on. Most of our players are American but we have a few from other parts of the world such as Australia that also get this bad rubber banding every night. It could just be the way our data is being routed to the server, and while I agree that the lag is 100% bearable compared to years ago... there's still a noticeable amount there at times (but it usually goes away after 15-20 minutes and doesn't resurface until the next night). If your hardware isn't being maxed out at all then it's likely just a routing issue to overseas areas. Also, Hetnzer oversells their bandwidth so that could be a cause of it as well, but then again so do nearly all hosting providers in that price range.

You should definitely request a new hard drive, although it's ridiculous that there's an additional charge for that - especially given your situation. If you end up having problems with them and need a new host I can help you find something in your area. I've worked with quite a few European hosting providers that were rock solid, although you'd end up paying maybe 20% more per month than what you currently are. Hetzner is dirt cheap

@i7 question - I used to use i7s for dedis but switching to a Xeon is like night and day. i7s just aren't build to handle massive loads the way a Xeon is. They're slightly more expensive because of it but it's no different than GPUs - you wouldn't want to use a $1000 Radeon in a workstation because the $400 FireGL card is going to perform much better since they were designed for two different things. Same way an Xbox or Playstation CPU can perform similar to a desktop CPU, even if it's based on multi-year old technology. If you can find a Xeon or Opteron for like 5-10% more cost per month... it would be a noticeable difference in performance.

[g1real]

Ah, the Haven community. How I've missed it.

Whine about how the game crashes all the time. Someone with experience and knowledge posts insight as to why it's happening and what can be done to fix it and you instantly start harassing them and telling them to leave. Good stuff.

No, get out. You make a claim, I asked to back it up. You proceed to act like a gigantic asshat while pulling the victim card, because you're butthurt someone doubted you for a split second. Blow off your high horse some more. And getting involved into the minecraft community? What sane person would want that .

Edit: You can reply to this post or just let me have had my say after you called me a retard, I think the latter works in your favor.

[Zou]

Thanks for taking the time to fix the server!