I have a driving map that freezes for a few seconds periodically and I cannot figure out why without help. Approximately every 8-12 min:
All players lose control of their character/vehicle. Everyone is effected simultaneously
All props that are moving stop updating. As the freeze ends the props are ‘jumpy’ for a few seconds before settling back to their normal smooth movement.
It feels like a stop-the-world garbage collection. I’m not even sure that is possible here, but that is what it feels like.
What I’ve tried:
Disable everything and try re-enabling individually to find the problem. I’ve done some of this but given that the iteration time is 10+ min and it’s a big map there is no way I can do it for the whole map.
Object pooling and recursion → loops. As I said before it feels like garbage collection so I implemented object pooling on the props that I spawn. Additionally I changed all instances of recursion to iteration, in case there was some issue with tail recursion or otherwise. Really reaching for straws here
After spending 3 weeks trying to fix this issue, I’m pretty confident I won’t be able to resolve it without some insights into what is happening behind the scenes. I do not believe it is a bug with my code per-se, more that whatever I am doing is putting pressure on some subsystem in a way that is causing issues.
I’m not aware of any way to get this sort of help which is why I’m posting here. Any thoughts or help would be much appreciated!
Edit: I should have mentioned, even with >2000+ hours played I have zero data under the performance tab in the dashboard so I’m unable to see the impact there.
@mmarklar Thank you for your report! We would like to look into this further, would you be able to submit a bug report using the form available here? Fortnite Creative
@Stevie-Moon Sorry to @ you but is there any way to track this? A ticket or something? I’d like to add more information: It seems the 25.30 update made this issue worse. It now happens every 3-6 minutes.
Well I finally got to the bottom of it. As I suspected it is an issue outside of my code, most likely in the Verse runtime/VM. I was able to rewrite my code to work around it. The take away is ‘don’t use race’.
Unfortunately having two weeks of freezes every 3 minutes has completely killed the map. No one wants to play that. Considering my numbers dropped 20x after the 25.30 update made it worse, I can’t help but wonder how it would have done without this bug.
Feels pretty bad! What feels worse though is the complete lack of communication from Epic. Even an automated email when submitting the bug report would be an improvement.
