Server issues.

[orgrune]

We started playing again after about a year or so of not playing ECO.
We are currently having semi-major issues with disconnections from the server. The guy being the server has no issue but the rest of us do. at regular intervals we all get disconnected from the server and have to relogg, things like chopping trees doesn't seem to register for us but for the server person it does. so I can chop away for ages and a tree will fall but not be cut up into pieces, you are my last resort!

Anyone have any suggestions on what could be the issue? we're all on high-speed fiber so that's not the issue.

[SLG-Dennis]

This is a typical sign of the server not being able to keep up with the actions of the players, usually an issue that occurs when the hardware isn't powerful enough. You could try to have someone else host the server or using a dedicated machine for it.

[orgrune]

yeah that should not be the issue in this case. The lil bugger playing the server is playing on a top end PC about 5 days old. ^_^

[SLG-Dennis]

High-End unfortunately says nothing in regards to Eco servers, especially with several players and one playing the client on the same computer. As I said, this is the typical behaviour for overload. The other typical behaviour for that is players being disconnected at world ticks.

[orgrune]

I'm fairly computer illiterate, but the smarter one in the group says it might have something to do with the "hyperthreading" on his processor.

[SLG-Dennis]

Eco servers do not use multiple cores well, they profit much more from high frequency than multiple cores (anything beyond two cores after world generation, actually), so depending on CPU model it's very possible for there to be issues with that, yes.

[orgrune]

I'm gonna give a proper bugrepport a decent try here.

We're only 3 people so far playing on one server. It keeps crashing in different and interesting ways.

Server 1:
GPU: RTX 3070, Asus ROG Strix.
PSU: Intel i5 12600k
RAM: 2*16

When he acts as server sometimes we other two get thrown out of the server at world tic as you mentioned but he stays on. Usually happens every 20-30 mins.
Weird other things happened like trees acting differently depending on who fells it and who is looking at it. I could cut a tree down but not chop it up when he was the server.

Server 2:
GPU: RTX 3080 10GB something something.
PSU: Intel i7-10700F 2.9GHz
RAM 2*16

When I act as server it takes a bit longer for world tic to throw us out (best time so far is 90mins) but all of us, including me acting as server, gets DCd. But no other weird server lagg seems to occur, everything else works as intended, mostly.

Server 3:
Old PC, no info, seems to work pretty well.


Is there anything we could do on our part to make it more stable? Server 3 is likely to play less than we other no-lifers.

Edit Note: We're pretty early still so it's not like a lot of things are happening. but there are an unusual amount of animals around.

[Rathelm]

Honestly, I wouldn't use any machine that the client is running on. The client has some sort of memory leak or something and just drains all the resources from the machine after as low as 10 minutes (depending on how much is happening). You really should run a dedicated server.

[orgrune]

Originally posted by Rathelm:

Honestly, I wouldn't use any machine that the client is running on. The client has some sort of memory leak or something and just drains all the resources from the machine after as low as 10 minutes (depending on how much is happening). You really should run a dedicated server.

have considered that a few times, but wouldn't that mean having to buy a secondary copy of the game? Or is there a server only option somewhere?

Last time we played we didn't have any of these issues really, but that was... oh I thought it was a year ago but might be closer to 2 years ago.


Edit: Can't find a dedicated server option in the main game.
Edit edit: Google was my friend after all. Slightly complicated but I guess I can get that to work with the help of a slightly more brainy friend.

[SLG-Dennis]

No, there really isn't something you could do. Eco just needs a lot of resources for server hosting. You don't need a second game copy for setting up a dedicated server on it's own machine or a dedicated server. You can also get them at several game server providers like Ping Perfect or G-Portal.

[gnome child]

As the dev said, and having experience as a server owner, Eco servers are EXTREMELY RAM heavy. Your friend should reduce the size of the map - this has a very large bearing on how well the server will run. Also, remember that just because the server supports generating the map, it may not support running the map with multiple concurrent players.

For example, I currently run a 248x248 world on a 4 CPU and 8GB RAM server. I could not build this map on the server because it took more than 8GB just to generate. I run a constantly 9-12 players at all points and my server hovers around 4-6GB. When I save the world, everything freezes for around 30-40 seconds and my server gets very close to my RAM limit. I will likely have issues launching my server a few weeks down the road, but we live and learn.

It is more important your friend closes as many unimportant programs as he can before launching the server - he may also want to make sure he hasn't been using his fancy new PC with hardware/software not correctly installed. I've seen a lot of new players with pre-builts that don't install drivers and don't even check if RAM is installed correctly before powering up and trying to run something very resource intensive. If he's on Linux, I always reboot the server every 12 hours and dump the kernel cache so the server has the maximum amount of free RAM for the next bootup.

All in all, it's your friend's PC, not yours that is causing the problem. I have 32GB of ram and have no issues running a server on my desktop, but I personally choose to host my server with Linode because it frees up my pc for running a local testing server when needed, using Linux has it's pluses, is way probably more efficient than the Windows server tools, and I can leave the server up 24/7 without friends relying on me to be playing.

[gnome child]

Also, I can honestly say avoid any mod on the Eco Mod Page past the first page of the Top Popular ones, and even be careful about those. About 70% of the mods I've tried adding from the modpage are broken. One in particular was causing my server to crash every tick update (around every 10-15 minutes - console error was quoting something about server tick erroring). Uninstalled the mod (applied energistics) and my problem was gone.

Also avoid EXTRA SERVER CONFIGURATION MOD - the owner has not updated it, and some of the functions are broken and will break critical things that aren't readily noticeable. Also the UI is very misleading and uninstalled all my mods lol.

If you're using mods for stack size changes, or being able to stack dirt in a shovel, or how far storage containers can link/reach. I highly suggest doing a tiny bit of research and just making those changes yourself in the server code. I was planning on getting a guide up soon because I've seen most of the stack size mods do it incorrectly and will break every update.

Here's a list of changes that is possible without any mods downloaded from the Mod page - these took me maybe a few hours to get finished:

- Food stack limits = 1000 per stack
- Item stack limits = 200 per stack
- Additional starting land claims
- Doubled stockpile & chest storage slot amounts
- Stockpiles/Storage chests reach further than default (Before = 5 (some set to 12), After = 35 for all storage container items)
- Placing items that usually only fit in hands or stockpiles into storage chests
- Probably way more but i can only read code and make small edits, definitely not a developer.

A lot of the above changes included commenting out one or two lines of code, or copying and pasting code from different files. I'm not sure if your server is even modded or not, but I hope it helps!