Server is really unstable
 

Okay I have only two players, me and my friend. I really have not had any problems and I do play from work on occasion, but nothing heavy duty because I play on a laptop.

I guess the server has been running about 3 months now with not much of a problem. I can seem to play all day long with no problems, but I do not do much for boss mobs. Now anytime my friend seems to be fighting some big, bad boss mob he has stability issues. Back when I was running a Windows server I could sometimes see his zone give a big error and go down, so I switched it to Linux last week hoping it would improve. It still was giving him issues so I purchased two copies of SoF thinking it could be his client, but the same thing. It always seems to do it when he is in some long ass battle though. I never hear him say it does it when he is just walking or something. Now the only real difference is that I am in my house and he is in another town, but we are on the same ISP.

As far as the server hardware it is all top notch, running in a VM and the VM's on this server never, ever give me problems so I know it is not that. Plus I can seem to play and leave my guy logged in with no issues.

I need ideas here though, he is getting really frustrated not being able to do any major raiding of fear of losing the battles.

I did happen to find this.

Okay I have some more information. I can almost say what it is not.

I had him log in last night after it crashed. He stayed in PoK all night, when I got up at 7am his guy was still on. So I know it is not our connections. I also dropped the server to just 4 dynamic zones. I played for 2 hours this morning with no problems at all. I ask him to log in, he goes to Temple of Veeshan and fights his way to a bad guy, no problems whatsoever. The entire time I am doing a tail on zone-dynamic_02.log

I all of a sudden see VI give me a message that that file is now truncated...... Dumb me did not save it though. I get a text message from him saying he was killing Ikatair the Venom and he was at 6% and he froze up, the exact time the file was truncated. I watched the server stats at that time. The server was only using a few mb of memory, only using about 2-3 percent of the 4 cores, this server is a beast. This only happens on boss mobs, and this Ikatiar the Venom is a rogue, so no spells. He also said yesterday it happened with Lendiniara the Keeper three times. He has reported it on Sontalak, Trakanon, Itraeur Vius.....could this be Rampage ??

From seconds of him losing connection I got this.

We just did this again on Trakanon. The file got truncated in the big fight around a rampage time, could be coincidental that it was around a Rampage though. Here is the last of the zone file before the truncation and disconnect.

As you are running Linux, you are well placed to try and track this down.

In a command prompt, before you run the script to start your zones, issue the command:
to enable core dumps.

Run eqlaunch to start the zones, then when you get a crash, you will have a file called core or core.nnnnn (where nnnnn is a number) in the same directory as your zone executable.

Next fire up gdb in the same directory with the zone executable and the core dump
At the (gdb) prompt, issue the command bt full. This will display a backtrace of the sequence of calls that lead up to the crash. You can copy and paste that here.

e.g.

Ok, I am going to try this within the hour. And thanks for taking the time to message back.

Thank you for looking at this. Took three BOSS kills but I witnessed it go down as I was GM standing in the one summoning the boss for him to kill. And letting you know my Debian is 32 bit,

petAI.cpp is Bot code, speak to Congdar :)

EDIT: The line number where the error occurred does not match up to the current version of petAI.cpp, so it is possible this may have been corrected, but as I say, Congdar is the guru of the bot code.

Yeah looking at the newest SVN, it looks like he is checking the dual wield differently now.

Actually I correct myself...it really does match up.

http://code.google.com/p/projecteqem...zone/petAI.cpp

Line 156 is identical.

The instance branch is no longer being updated, the latest version is in the trunk:

http://code.google.com/p/projecteqem...zone/petAI.cpp

Is this just for that one file, or the entire instance branch ? I guess I did not get the memo.

The entire instance branch is gone, since it was all merged back into the trunk R612.

Yeah I finally got that memo. You posting like 30 seconds before I did.

Just letting you all know that all is well now. Server is running beautiful, no more crashes whatsoever. I really appreciate everyone's hard work.