Server is crashing and I have NO IDEA why. Help!!

Development Modding ARK: Survival Evolved
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1

Okay… So I have been hosting a server for the last 2-3 months and building a small community within it. The last 3+ weeks I have been having severe server instability and I am hoping I can get some feedback from other server owners on if they’ve had any similar issues.

Basically the issue I am having is that after an undetermined amount of time of the server being up, it will “crash” but not in the traditional sense. What I mean by that, is anyone who is currently online will be disconnected and be unable to reconnect and instead will time-out, HOWEVER it will show them as still connected in the server browser until the server is restarted (so for example; if they connected immediately before the crash, and I don’t restart the server for 6 hours, it will say they have been connected for 6 hours despite not actually being on the server). Additionally, the server remains online, showing that it is up both on the steam/ark server list as well as from my game control panel. However, anyone who was not previously connected trying to connect to the server will also time-out.

Is this a common problem within the server hosting community? Has anyone else had these issues? Full disclosure, I am using host havok and they have been incredibly helpful and I’ve been very happy with my service but I feel like this has to be on their end. After submitting a ticket regarding this, they more or less said it was due to mods that this was occurring.

I cannot say for sure, but I SWEAR this was an issue before I had even added mods; just to be sure, I began removing mods from the server. I did notice that the strange crashing behavior seemed to happen less, but it just happened yet again today. The ONLY mod I have currently running is the “metal with glass” mod which is a relatively popular mod, and if that were somehow causing sever crashes I would think it would have been reported by now… even before removing mods, the only mods I had were “clean” and “stackable” and popularly vetted mods that many servers are running…

So I am asking, is this a common occurrence for other people hosting unmodded servers? Is this a common occurrence for people hosting servers with only “clean” and “stackable” mods? Is this really on my servers end or is this due to something on the host’s end that I cannot control?

If needed, I could post my server configs if you guy’s think that would be helpful, but I really don’t see how any variable I would change in there would be causing people to suddenly be disconnected and time out when attempting to reconnect whilst the server still remains “up”

Thanks for reading and thanks for any help you can offer.

2

Sounds strange, let me ask you this, do you have access to SSH ? or can you check your resources on the server ? i have never used game server Hosting companie, so i don’t know the limitations, i use AWS my self.

3

Im not sure what SSH is, but as far as the resources go my hosting company tells me my server is using about 1GB more RAM than their typical server; though I’m not entirely sure why. I have my dino count set to 1 and none of my other settings are so astronomical that they should be effecting gameplay; most my rates are relatively close to vanilla rates except for my baby maturation rates.

4

i would try to save the files from your current Ark and reinstall the Server … and try to update your Glasmetal Mod manual, somtimes they dont do this automatik and thes makes bugs.

An other posibilety could be that a already deleted Mod cause this. After An Ark update my GateMod made problems with crashes.
Problem was after the Update all Modloaddata was deleted and all the strucktures from mods was gone but if you build ofer the gone strucktures and tryed to demolish them the Server crashed.
Could be somthing like that…

5

My hosted server has also been having this issue from around the time of the Halloween event. Think it was actually a little prior to the event but it does the same thing. Will kick everyone, we can’t connect even though the server shows online with players in it. One thing I noticed is that say there 8 people when it crashes. When I look at control panel it shows 8 people. If I try to join and then look at control panel it now shows 9 people, try again it says 10 and so on. Really weird and really random. Can go days without a crash sometimes, can’t go an hour without several crashes other days.
The only mods Im running are 2 of Mine (better beacons and bb building loot) and Epic Sickle by my clan mate FancyFlannel but they were all on before this issue started so I’m 99.99% sure it is not mod related.

6

Same here; even if it crashes with 4 people connected, each time a person trys to connect and is unsuccessful, it will add them to the server count (though won’t show their name in game) so sometimes when I come home after work, if it crashed with 4 people connected, it will show 4 names in the server, but it will show 12/35 because of people trying to connect and timing out throughout the day.

Not sure what host you use, but with the Host Havok telling me my server was using ~1gb more RAM than most, I decided to try something out. I had a large pen filled with tamed wandering dodo’s, and due to my server settings a lot of the time if they have a baby it will hatch on it’s own and mature to adulthood while still being unclaimed. This led to a LOT of dodo’s in the area… like… a lot. So I spawned myself a ascendant rocketlauncher and killed them ALL. I did this Saturday morning and so far this weekend have not had a single crash, which for me is a good sign because I don’t know when I last went more than 24 hours without a crash (though I do have a scheduled restart everday at 3AM cst).

Maybe it was possible that too many entities running around was seizing up the sever and causing it to crash; if so, that is very sad because I can only foresee this being a bigger problem for larger servers, or for servers that have been around a long time with lots of buildings/characters/dinos running around. I wonder if it is due to the hardware it was running on, in that case, or if it is just a current limitation in alpha Ark.

EDIT: Also, I like your better beacons lite! Thanks!

7

So to update; the server seems stable, and mods have been added back. I did notice an interesting trend from when I was still having the issue on my server’s control panel “graph” page.

Every “flat” players bar is where the server had crashed, and thus locked that # of players in the server and therefore preventing it from fluctuating as you normally see it doing. During those same “flat” periods of # of players, the CPU performance drops to zero.

Lastly, you can see the 28th is where I went around killing off the 100’s of wandering dodo’s on the RAM graph, where it drops ~500mb and thus I have stopped having issues

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8

Kixiepoo,

Have you had any issues since your last post? My server has been having the exact same issues for several months now and we can’t seem to find a fix. Like yours my server can be running for several days with no issues at all, but then suddenly it starts ‘crashing’ every few minutes to hours. I have noticed that the crashing partly seems to correlate with the number of players on the server, for an example if it is just one or two players online we don’t have any issues at all, but once we get about five or more players it is seemingly bound to crash. While I don’t have the dodo farm you had the largest tribe on the server has a massive expanse of dinos, typically 5-6 of each breed that for the most part remain stagnant on the Herbivore Island.

We were originally running a few mods, but for troubleshooting purposes we have removed all the mods and deleted all the server files so we could start from scratch again, along with that I even had Host Havoc move my server from the Montreal node to the Dallas node so that I could rule out a possible hardware issue with the server.

Alongside the ‘crashing’ issue we are constantly having moderate to severe rubber banding and lag despite most of us having a 20-40ms ping. I have recently noticed massive spikes in the rubber banding when another player(s) joins the server.

Also on a side note how did you get the memory and cpu graph? I can only find the player graph when going through the control panel.

Any help or input will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Currently running version 235.5 with no mods.

9

disable the gamelogs… look online how to disable the game logs that show on the shootergameserver cmd its whats causing the server crashes… not the tribe logs its game logs putting high loads on dedicated servers

10

The gamelogs aren’t enabled.

11

this sounds like RCON is enabled with an RCON client holding open the connection, which is BAD. A lot of the RCON tools out there do this, so much so, I had to write my own RCON client to open the connection, pass the cmd’s, then close the connection to RCON gracefully.

12

This does sound plausible, but I don’t see it being the issue due to how the RCON client works on the server end. To launch RCON the server must be completely stopped and once it is done so I can connect via the client, to start the server again I have to disconnect the client or it won’t do anything. If this was the case how would I look to see if that is happening and/or resolve the issue?

13

you can always use a network sniffer or check to see what connections are being held active on the server. RCON should show as an open port, but you shouldn’t have an active connection to RCON 24/7.

And as to help/support with RCON clients, I would be the worst to ask, as I am only familiar with my own.

14

Did you ever locate what your server problem was? I am current experiencing the exact same issue and cannot make heads or tails of it. It is very annoying and is causing a lot of grief with the players on our server.