Server rentals :: NFOservers.com

A few RSPs will be trialling the server during this evening/morning. The new server update will begin rollout with all RSPs during Tuesday if no gotchas are found.

Changelog
Fixed the most common server crash. The story behind this one is fairly convoluted:

When a player begins the process of joining a server, the server will begin buffering some kinds of information in anticipation of the player completing the loading & joining phase. However, players sometimes get stuck in the loading screen. This makes the server buffer more and more info for that player. A side effect of this is a temporary resource leak in the game server. The leak is immediately restored if the server changes map, or the player completes loading, or the player shuts down the game client. However if a player manages to remain stuck for 30+ minutes in loading on a server with lots of activity and the server doesn’t end the round, then the server could run out of the particular resource – it would then crash.

The new server version will forcibly disconnect clients which are threatening to exhaust that particular resource. With this change in place, we do not know of anything that would make high-ticket servers less stable than normal-ticket servers.

Long banlists will not crash the server.

The banlist supports up to 10.000 entries now.
The banList.list command has been modified to return at most 100 entries at a time (similar to how BC2 PC’s banList.list command works).
Any administrative tools will need to be updated to be able to see more than the first 100 entries.

Corrections to the banlist documentation.


The new server administrator documentation can be found here: http://static.cdn.ea.com/dice/u/f/bfbc2 ... trator.zip [static.cdn.ea.com]

We've put a hold on rolling out this patch because many servers are crashing frequently when Procon is used, likely due to the new banlist code.

This is a good argument for testing things for a bit before they're globally rolled; if we'd put this out to customers, we'd be having to roll back servers right now. We try to do such testing with optional beta updates, though at least one customer has given us flak for a short bit of extra delay in the past.

The problem with the patch is likely deeper than that -- I don't think it's a problem with Procon, but rather with the new banlist-handling code on the server side. This seems to be happening when the list is requested. We'll wait for a fix from DICE instead of trying to work around the problem, since they should have one out tomorrow morning.

R19 was sent to us this morning and we're currently testing it. We haven't made an official announcement yet, but if you'd like it applied to your server to help with the testing, please contact us.

R19 was sent to us this morning and we're currently testing it. We haven't made an official announcement yet, but if you'd like it applied to your server to help with the testing, please contact us.