PF Usage help

[cavedude]

I already posted why above. There is a memory leak in dynamic zones, and it's pretty bad. Meaning, even when they close dynamic zones will continue to slowly use up memory until you either kill the process, or reboot the server. Until it's fixed you have to watch it.

[thepoetwarrior]

Oh, my bad cavedude, I saw Trevius reply, not yours, but now I see it. Thanks for the information, that helps out a lot. I figured it was a memory leak slowly growing.

Since you specifically stated dynamic zones, does that mean static zones are differnt and would not have a memory leak? Or is it all really the same process?

Thanks for your help and advise cavedude.

[cavedude]

On TGC static zones don't seem to be effected. Wildcardx took a look on his test server a while back and confirmed the same thing... Dynamics will continue to suck down memory, but static zones will use and free it as needed. There have been times I have seen dynamics using upwards of 300MB memory, and often they aren't even booted! So it's something you certainly want to watch, unless you have the resources to run all static, which would be the preferred method anyway.

[erik_llewellyn]

I did some research last night on Zone memory/CPU usage and came up with this link

http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/sho...ht=zone+memory

Based on his system specs (2x3.4 GHz CPU, 512MB ram, and running win2k pro), I would guestimate total memory usage to load up all 397 zones staticly(based on current PEQ-4-1106 update DB) to be around 3.5~4 GB with 25~30% constant CPU usage and assuming no one is logged into your server. Most people won't have that much physical ram, but pagefile cache can be used to augment it. While using PF "memory" lets you run more than you otherwise would be able to, it is far slower than having as much physical memory as you can get. From what I have noticed on my server (Athlon64 3000+, 1.5 GB ram, 3 GB PF, winXP Pro-32bit) is that a PF cached static zone loads about as fast as a dynamic zone while a ram cached static zone loads about 4x faster.

[thepoetwarrior]

Thanks much. Info helped a lot.

[thepoetwarrior]

I successfully got a static zone to boot and saw that in the /server command. Then did #zoneshutdown on it, but the zone stayed down. So I #zone to enter the zone, and it booted up as a dynamic zone.

Any way I can make zones that were shut down to reboot up in static again instead of dynamic? Im using Trevius's zone reset quest. Hope this all makes sense. Thanks for your help in advance.

[trevius]

That is a problem. Anytime a static zone crashes or resets, it will restart in a dynamic zone that is already in idle state waiting for someone to zone in.

I have recently switched to Linux and have completely disabled all of my zone resetter scripts. Apparently player ghosting doesn't happen on Linux at all, and I wasn't able to get someone to actually confirm this until recently. So far, it seems really promising. I used AndMetal's Wiki for a Debian Linux install and some info from one of the other Linux Wikis.

I am going to do another rebuild of Linux on my server PC (it is running on my main PC atm) and I will write some guide additions to help anyone else get things completely setup. The guides available are really great, but there are a couple of nice things that could be added to help some.

If you ever decide to try building a Linux server again, I should be able to give you a hand now, since I have done it a couple of times. Mine is up and running good, but I am still a noob myself lol. I am still working on tweaking the server. So far it seems really nice.