Out of Memory Error on Dedicated Server

[Chaos]

As the title states, I'm hosting a server instance for a friend on my server platform on a Windows Server 2019 VM and have given it 16 cores (Host is running dual Xeons w/ 24 cores in total) as well as 64GB RAM and I've been receiving an error in the event log spamming an Out of Memory error.

Is this related to hosting it on a VM or within Windows Server? This should be a norm for a dedicated server host you would think. I originally had it at 32GB RAM after reading the requirements but it crashed so I upped the memory. We have 3 players on the server in total.

Also, when I open task manager and review the usage on the server, both CPU and Memory usage are incredibly low likely due to me giving it way more power than it needs. It hovers at about 5GB of memory usage so it's nowhere near the 64GB of available memory.

I've seen this reported years ago but is there any fixes or suggestions because as it stands the game is largely unplayable due to the near constant crashes.

[Zak]

Something else is happening. The server can run 4 players with 16GB od RAM and prefers a single, fast core, it's not heavily multithreaded, unfortunately. So yeah, you're throwing way more power at it already than it needs. How much physical RAM does your server actually have? Any other VMs running on it?

[Zak]

LOL. Old thread I know, found it by googling :) This just started happening to me today, out of the blue over 50,000 Out of Memory errors in the Event Viewer in a single afternoon. Though it still works. I guess 1.0 can't come fast enough :)

[Chaos]

Exactly - it works but the event viewer isn't happy about it and it's bloating the log size. Also to respond to the previous post, my server has physically 256 GB of RAM, 64 of which was assigned to the VM and running Windows Server. The threads themselves aren't incredibly fast as most Xeon server grade processors aren't super fast on a single thread but rather sport many threads for multitasking. In my case my server is dual CPU. By the sounds of it however it would seem the server would run better on a super fast gaming PC that has fast single thread. Again those CPUs aren't designed for server use and would burn out much faster than the work horses currently installed. Let's see how 1.0 goes.

[Zak]

Yeah, seems to get worse as the game gets bigger. I'm just a single user on the server and it has 32GB of RAM, nothing else is running, most software and service are removed or stopped and there is always over 20GB free, so it's a bug in the server code.

Yes, the devs said the server prefers single, fast core. This unlikely to change in 1.0. I tested three machines, same save file, same SSD, all had 32GB of RAM: 7500T, 6700K and 9900K. And the server misbehaved the same way on all three. I tinkered a lot, trying things like disabling Hyperthreading and boosting single core on the 6700K and 9900K (7500T is locked), increasing priorities with Process Lasso, nothing made a difference.

According to Geekbench 5 the 9900K single thread performance is only about 30% better than the 7500T, while multi core performance is improved nearly 300%, so most of the generational improvement is in multi-threading, it seems. So it's a pity that the server can't take better advantage of multi-core CPUs. Our only hope is they were able to significantly optimize and improve the server.

BTW, I tried both Linux and Windows servers, same thing.

[Chaos]

At this point I think what I'm going to do is visit that questions.satisfactorygame.com site and report it there to see if it can get some awareness. I can write a batch script that clears the logs to keep the bloat from going out of control so it's not a game ending issue but it's definitely a problem when it comes to server hosting. I'm surprised honestly this hasn't been reported yet with all the techies we have in the fan base.

[Zak]

Oh, the devs know that the server is in bad shape :) They acknowledged it many times. They have improved the server a lot apparently. 1.0 is coming out in 10 days, so I'd just wait and see. Don't waste your time on bug reports right now as Update 8 days are almost over. Let's see how the 1.0 server looks like first.

Edit: I just checked, it has been reported on QA site 3 years ago, but it was probably lost among all other problems. Also, they have done little work on multiplayer and server over the last few years, leaving it for the end of the development cycle. As I understand a lot of work has been done on MP and DS in the last several months.

[Chaos]

Awesome let's do that. Ill check back in on this thread after the release and update my findings as well as on the QA site. If this issue hasn't been addressed then it will become more apparent with everyone playing again.

[Zak]

Yes! Just nine more days and we'll see :)