Hotfix 195.024 Breaks Dedicated Servers

I just tested on another machine and the server simulation speed stayed at 1.0 for about an hour then dropped and never recovered. So it seems that this bug develops over time after updating to the recent hotfix, as opposed to happening right away.

Quick update. It seems like this had something to do with floating objects. We've had a lot of game breaking bugs with the recent updates. Each time I will slowly remove things from the server until we see a change in behavior. This time I removed all asteroids, planets, grids, mods, etc and no difference. Then, when I removed the floating objects the server became more stable.

You can see from the attached screenshot that the server is closer to 1.0 sim speed now, but it's really unstable. Prior to this most recent update it seldomly went below 1.0 and was usually a straight line along 1.0 sim speed.

Something has definitely changed, but until this gets addressed by Keen, you can save your server by not allowing floating objects (by doing frequent cleanups).

Can confirm the same thing happening on our dedicated servers. Unfortunately, in our instance cleaning floating objects didn't do much. Our servers that were 0.9 - 1.0 under load before the update are now 0.5 - 0.6 even with a low amount of players. One of our servers with less than 15 grids and 6 players was even experiencing severe sim loss.

We have the same issue but floating objects have nothing to do with it. We also had a server, no planets, 15 grids, 5 players, and it was at 0.5 sim. Prior to the hotfix that same server, same players, same grids was at 1.0 for weeks now.

Same issue on our server, cleaning floating objects didn't help. 12 players with about 25 grids, .9-1.0 sim for weeks, after the update - same grids and players and sim is fluctuating as well as server CPU load. Jumping up to almost 300% at times for no apparent reason.

Hello, Engineers!

Thank you for contacting us. Could you please provide us a save of your server where you are experiencing the issue? So far I haven't been able to reproduce this issue.

Thank you!

Kind Regards

Keen Software House: QA Department

@keen, here you go.

Hmm, it's not allowing me to upload. It says there's a 9mb limit, which is not much. How would you like me to share?

"vanilla survival - the expanse" server is reporting very bad sim speed. Limiting hinges seems to help us stay above .6

but unless the server is nearly empty, we dont see better than .6-.8

Before the update we were locked at 1.0 even with 30 players online. Its a unbelievably noticable differance. does keen not Q/A multiplayer? it is not good to neglect your fanbase who play on dedicated servers.

Between both my servers, only my squeakly clean creative testing server is showing normal simspeed and CPU load after the update. My previously stable survival server is now bouncing around at roughly 0.6 Simspeed.

Hello,

SkunkWorks is experiencing the same massive sim speed. It started recently and it is random. We used to run a fairly large map (1300 Grids, max players 30) at a .75-8 sim. Now we are lucky to get a .5 with 10 players on. It seems to be related to the server thread CPU load. The load used to settle around 75%-115% now if fluctuates between 150% - 300%. We run an i9-9900K on a dedicated box and we only started having issues after the last few hotfixes.

WORLD FILE

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PLbACC1LofynG2iXxaegxRjvkRzl02gz/view?usp=sharing

Hello, Engineers!

Thank you for your information and saves. We will investigate it.

Kind Regards

Keen Software House: QA Department

Hello, Engineers!

Can you please confirm that this issue also occurs on vanilla servers? Can you please provide us with vanilla server save?

Thank you for your help.

Kind Regards

Keen Software House: QA Department

Keen,

We know you don't "officially" provide support for modded servers, we've all heard it before, but please for the sake of the community, go and conduct a half decent investigation of what the hotfix broke rather than falling back and hiding behind the same throw away line like it's a shield.

It has been mentioned multiple times on this thread that your official servers appear to be experiencing the same issue. Might I suggest you start there rather than asking for more vanilla saves because we all know the community is held together by mods, so that ask is a stretch.

Please don't be that team that is too proud to admit fault, you're better than that, if the hotfix has reported issues, conduct a proper investigation and roll it back if need be. Dedicated servers are the lifeblood of this game, so please assist us by identifying and resolving this issue quickly.

Thank you.

Kateřina,

We, as a community, appreciate all of the hard work and dedication that Keen has tirelessly implemented in this game. It is truly a labor of love. That being said, as a server admin, I find myself at an impasse. Our server is losing player base to constant drops in sim speed, we are trying every fix we can to bandaid the situation but it is persistent. These people love your game, they have spent hundreds of hours messing about on the server. When you guys push a major update or paid DLC, we sit together and watch the live streams and eagerly buy the content to build more.

Surely there can be a way the community and the development team can communicate about this? Why not gather the server owners/admins together in a call to discuss these issues? We can all test together in real-time or show you what exactly is happening on our servers. Why not log onto the official keen servers or pull reports from them to test the validity of our claims? Its been over a week, and while I understand that you are only a QA rep, there needs to be something that can be done here.

I've noticed a drop in singleplayer too.

Weird thing is that, as soon as I start all is fine, after a minute or so it starts dropping sitting at around 0.5 sim speed.

Hello Keen,

Attached is my world file. I will email support with the archive password. World is vanilla with many many grids.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e4OCTiSeypqXoA-GWevRozaoOVcYky-0/view?usp=sharing

Thank you for the support.

I don't have a vanilla save to provide, but I wanted to re-iterate that while this report may not have the highest number of votes, that is simply a reflection of the fact that single-player players are not aware of it. Please, take this bug report seriously.

Our player numbers have tanked in the past week directly as a result of this issue. As soon as we have more than about 12 players on server the sim drop issues make the server borderline unplayable where it would usually be sitting at 1.0 until we hit the 25-30 player mark (with the exception of combat or ships crashing into voxels).

Of all the bugs reported in these forums, this is the biggest and most pressing issue outside of our control that our server has faced in the past 6-12 months. Like many others, we spend an enormous amount of time trying to optimise our server to run smoothly and seeing these kind of issues still marked as More Information Needed with no one actively communicating about the issue being worked on honestly make server admins question why they even bother pouring hundreds of hours into developing and maintaining their servers.

Well said Rob11 - and I'd like to echo that comment 100%.

Hello, everyone!

Thank you for your saves and all information, we are investigating this issue. We would still welcome any other vanilla saves. Thank you for your patience.

Kind Regards

Keen Software House: QA Department

Katerina, sources are saying that Keen have identified and fixed this bug in 196, can you confirm?

Hello, everyone!

This issue should be fixed in version 196.011. Can you please confirm?

Thank you.

Keen Software House: QA Department