[Server] HOMETOWN

[Lone_Wolf]

My internet device broke last night. So I won't be able to do anything related to internet until it is fixed. I'll be on forced vacation until then. (I probably need it). Will post on Discord too.
Bye for a hopefully little amount of time

[micheal65536]

In fact it was "stalled" with no output in the debug.txt
Really odd. The service was running, and unable to restart. I had to manually kill the process to allow it to restart automatically.

I have had that happen a few times when I am writing a mod. Minetest hangs and cannot be terminated other than by being forcefully killed. I'm pretty sure it was caused by an infinite loop each time it happened.

Of course, with no debug output, there's no way to know where the loop is happening. If it's a recursive loop you have it easy because it will eventually crash with a stack overflow and the debug output will show the place where the overflow occurred (which is usually quite close to the cause of the loop). But if it's an iterative loop then Minetest will quite literally just hang without any output and without responding to any signals. Unless you enable some sort of logging for each function call or mod callback, there's no way to know where the loop is occurring.

[dawgdoc]

On my last visit to the server I was in the small chamber at the head of my mine where all of my protected chests were located when I logged out. I logged into the server tonight, the first time since before the crash. :-{

I found myself buried in stone with there being no evidence of having ever been on the server. :-[ Well once I dug myself out of the stone, I found that I was at the site of my former chamber. It was back to solid stone, the crops on my lake terrace were gone, the pro-blocks covering the chamber and crops were gone. Other than the few diamond picks, a stack of bread, and some cobble in my bags; I find myself making a clean start way out in the boonies.

I have definitely reset enable_local_map_saving to true.

[calculon]

Hi there, sorry if this is the wrong place, but i asked in the dedicated topic of the forum just a few days before the crash, and it's still down. So could someone grant me the liquid priv please? I'm calculon in game.

[GreenXenith]

Hi there, sorry if this is the wrong place, but i asked in the dedicated topic of the forum just a few days before the crash, and it's still down. So could someone grant me the liquid priv please? I'm calculon in game.

Granted :)

[lprchaum_]

There has been some lag lately. Doing many basic tasks does not feel as smooth as it used to be on HT. Things that take time:

• Placing blocks (the blocks disappear and reappear a bit)
• Mining (the blocks disappear and reappear a bit)
• Switching bags takes time
• Opening chests takes time

Is there a specific reason for this and could we possibly see some improvement in this area? As always, thanks for the hard work EDaD!

[Stix]

Is the overlapping mapgen using a different seed than the original? I went to my tiny natural lava-cave via teleport but it wasn't there; instead a few blocks down there was a giant cavern.

[ExeterDad]

Is the overlapping mapgen using a different seed than the original? I went to my tiny natural lava-cave via teleport but it wasn't there; instead a few blocks down there was a giant cavern.

Not a different seed, and the exact same mapgen parameters. But....

When HOMETOWN first started, caverns and Silver Sand were not a part of mapgen v7. So much world was generated with that version of v7. We were running a dev version at the time, and would keep pretty current with the master branch. There were things introduced and even reverted from time to time that I had no control of. Caverns was one of them. I had deliberately kept Caverns disabled as I saw it was coming. But on first run, the code added Caverns to our world.mt and Caverns were introduced. In some places it was pretty ugly as the new never blended with the original. So now we are starting with Caverns right off the bat. And there will be some located where they were not before. I chose to keep them as we have many builds down there. And many are within caverns people had discovered.

[ExeterDad]

There has been some lag lately. Doing many basic tasks does not feel as smooth as it used to be on HT. Things that take time:

• Placing blocks (the blocks disappear and reappear a bit)
• Mining (the blocks disappear and reappear a bit)
• Switching bags takes time
• Opening chests takes time

Is there a specific reason for this and could we possibly see some improvement in this area? As always, thanks for the hard work EDaD!

I have to run the profiler (slow and painfully laggy) to get a picture of what's going on. I can't find anything obvious in the logs as I've noticed this and do see some ABM warnings. There's been a bunch of changes, but not to any of our mods. It could be our upgraded database needs different configuration and is a bottleneck. It could be something is clashing with our new Minetest engine and game version. It could even be our upgraded Debian9 needs some different config tweaking.
Sorry I don't have your answer at this time. After I get our new forums up and running (pretty close), I'll start debugging the game server.

[Fixer]

Other server owner reported such stalls as well, if you can get backtrace during stall - that will be helpful to devs. To get it, you need to compile debug build of the server and run it under gdb, then during stall, IIRC, you stop execution and then do backtrace to see what happening and report it on github.

[micheal65536]

To get it, you need to compile debug build of the server and run it under gdb, then during stall, IIRC, you stop execution and then do backtrace to see what happening and report it on github.

That will create a ridiculous amount of lag though.

[Fixer]

But will help to fix stalls....

[shacharr]

But will help to fix stalls....

I believe you can compile a version with debug symbols for stack trace, but with optimizations enabled to avoid too much lag. Also, you can launch the server without gdb, and attach it when stall happens.

For a short term fix, might be worthwhile to consider a watchdog that detects the stall by pinging the server and forcing it to crash (and create a core dump) if a stall is detected.

[ExeterDad]

Oddly there hasn't been any stalls (that I know of) since those two. I wondering if it's somehow related to my tinkering with ssl when working on getting the forums set up. *shrug

[6722]

If you think whats happening to you is bad look at this

[6722]

Actually nvm cause you cant post pics on phone

[Nelly]

Actually nvm cause you cant post pics on phone

Hhe i glitched a way on how to

[Nelly]

But my lag is so much i keep conneting timed out.

[doyousketch2]

Writing a mod to help with lag. Haven't tested it out yet, but the idea is def'ly worthwhile.
https://github.com/doyousketch2/server_tuning

Also, you mentioned upgrading Debian.
When compiling Minetest on Debian, it defaults to using Lua instead of LuaJIT.
You'll want to make sure it's set to find the proper LuaJIT path to improve speed.

sudo apt-get install mlocate && updatedb

cmake . -DRUN_IN_PLACE=1 -DENABLE_GETTEXT=1 -DENABLE_FREETYPE=1 -DENABLE_LEVELDB=1 -DLUA_INCLUDE_DIR=`locate -br ^luajit-2.1$` && make -j$(nproc) && cd bin

[ExeterDad]

We use LuaJIT, always have :) Also we don't enable leveldb, we use postgres. And we are installed systemwide with a proper Systemd service rather than Run in place.
But I will take a peek at your server tune mod.

[doyousketch2]

We use LuaJIT, always have :) Also we don't enable leveldb, we use postgres. And we are installed systemwide with a proper Systemd service rather than Run in place.

K, cool. Yea, wasn't saying for you to change the other things.
Just an example from what was listed in Calinou's one-line script.


The idea of the script is: that when a couple people are on,
players can enjoy greater values in a few key variables.
such as max_block_send_distance and item_entity_ttl.

As more players enter, those values are trimmed back, to optimize performance.

[Miss Micah]

I’m done with the server for a while...so yeah. Later.

[Nelly]

I’m done with the server for a while...so yeah. Later.

Why you done with server?

[Miss Micah]

I’m done with the server for a while...so yeah. Later.

Why you done with server?

My feelings toward something on the sever have caught up with me....so yeah....

[pangland]

Hi ExeterDad! I cannot login to the server. Seems the server had crashed. Hoping that is not the server auto update again lol