stability problems -- freezes and crashes and lagggggggg

the game seems to be very, very unstable the last 2 or 3 days.

i had two significant freezes, followed by a period of excessive lag where the game became unplayable.  then it returned to more or less normal.
then a hard crash, followed by another freeze, followed by another hard crash.  ALL of that has occurred in the last 2 1/2 hours.

at this rate-- the game is unplayable.

I have experienced the same freezes where some or all players stop responding. A new sign-in is required. Trying to be specific, it seems to happen at unexpected times, even when I am in the city and have just initially signed-on. It does not seem related to what I happen to be doing at the time or a specific situation I encountered. Frequently, just letting a player sit while attending to another may cause that waiting char to not respond. This has happened repeatedly. Sometimes but not always, when confronted with a char not responding, I have to kick the char off to successfully sign back in.

Here is what I see:

Player A is in the dungeon with numerous chars.
Player B starts signing in chars.
The game freezes for both.

Player A moves from one room to another room. The game freezes (and often time those chars die.) --I am guessing there is a very rare mistake in how the encounters are assigned.

I notice that when the dungeon assigns a text display (like in the rooms from the dragon stud room on 15) that lead to 15a or 16 -- there are no encounters, the text displays correctly. As we already discussed via email-- the texts present in Halloween town that triggered at the same time an encounter was supposed to display would crash/freeze the game.

Player A makes a wrong entry via keyboard. "fat fingers" or types in something the game isn't expecting to see. The game either "freezes" for that single char or "crashes" the entire game.

The laaags seem to be centered around long running scripts -- I don't think internet connectivity would generate such results. I have been running a group of 7 when moving from room to room triggers a long pause then 1 char displaying the room. long pause, second and 3rd char displaying the room, then first char popping up the encounter, then chars 4-7 displaying the room, then another long pause. Char 1 is now losing hits, finally gets an options window, char 4-7 are now displaying the encounter or are now dead....

this is how it goes. and this has happened 2 or 3 times a day over the last 3 or 4 days.

can we fix this please????

billy G

Its down AGAIN.

Made a couple runs, returned to city.  And it froze up or crashed.  Ended up closing all clients, and restarting them.  I got one guy signed in, tried to sign in a second and as I entered the password, it let me type about 3 characters of his password, and no more.  the other window was frozen as well--  and it is still down now.

billy G

It appears to still be down.  I'm going take a week or so off, since this is aggravating me alot more than I should let it.

I'm taking a look at things today, based on posts here and some data that JP has shared with me. We have been having a *lot* of internet outages in my neighborhood (where the Javatar server is located), but I also understand there are some issues with the server application. I will be addressing one of those today--namely the issue with dungeon display text. I will also be putting the server application in 'error trap mode' today, which allows me to see the line of code that is failing if and when a crash occurs. Stay tuned!

-Jude

Darn....just now froze up again with six chars in the FH. No response to trying to sign back in at the moment. Hope the error trap mode proves something.

miger

This week, I did some digging into our stability issues. The modem log revealed that there was some 'upstream' instability, so I spent some time troubleshooting some wiring issues. I removed some splitters and now have a much more robust connection to the coaxial connection from the outside of my house to the Javatar server.

In addition to these hardware fixes, I have also purchased a new cable modem, one that supports the latest protocol. (Apparently my ISP is slowly migrating away from the protocol on my current modem, but has not notified me about this.) So I am hopeful that the addition of this new cable modem will also bring some increased stability. I can't make any promises in this area, but hey, at this point it couldn't hurt!

The bandwidth of this new modem is substantially higher than the one we are currently running with... but Javatar does not require a whole heck of a lot.

I'll post here again (probably with a proper announcement in the forum) when the new cable modem is up and running.

-Jude

The new cable modem was installed a while ago (see announcements), but I am making good on my promise of following up here. I'm also working to clean up my exterior coax coupling/grounding and talking with my ISP about ongoing connectivity issues. Stay tuned!