Why do we wipe frequently?

[RyanJD]

We wipe when we have to, due to the performance of Rust in it's current state. Every object a player places, every player connected and every sleeper on the server contributes to lag. We've worked out that for every 10,000 objects placed (building parts, campfires, item stacks etc) around 70ms-110ms (depending on players connected) is added to the server garbage collect and on-tick/run commands, such as server saves and the like.

Due to the popularity of Rustoria Zeus, the amount of entities which it gets is quite astounding - average 180,000 after the first 20 hours on average. That's around 1.8s of lag already after the first 20 hours! The general rule of thumb at the moment is that 200,000 entities is the upper limit and wipes when they hit it; and we're usually around 250,000 midway through the second day of wipe (2.5s lag on save/ticks) - to account for this, we have decay in place, which whilst not aggresive enough to prolong the server health over 4 days, it does keep the server *somewhat* stable over the course of the 4 days, getting roughly 45-70k entities per day based on the popularity of the server on that particular wipe (the server usually has 350-400k entities when we wipe).

Also, after 175,000 entities things start to go a little weird; plugins start to break, the server hangs on restart etc.

So... we don't wipe for the sake of it; we wipe because we have to.

We're currently in the process of upgrading Rustoria Zeus's dedicated server from an i7-4790k 4.2Ghz to an Overclocked i7-6700k 4.7Ghz machine, and we're continuing to spend Rustoria's income on server upgrades, custom plugins (which involves re-writing current plugins to run better - not that anyone really sees this hidden side) and much more. This is the route we will continue to take, as we do not wish to change how Zeus plays (High Pop, Modded) - we're also eargerly awaiting Unity/Rust optimisation from Facepunch.

Please do feel free to join Rustoria Enyo; it's the same setup, but has a 150 player limit and a max clan size of 3 - it wipes on Tuesdays and Fridays at 11AM UK time.

I hope this gives a clearer understanding!