Curious About Update Time

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Mycologist
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Curious About Update Time

Post by Mycologist »

I'm just curious why NFO takes the longest to apply TF2 updates to servers? The TF2 Christmas update was released over 2 hours ago and our servers sit with an outdated version. I see almost every other server in the area up and running within an hour of most updates. Is it a manual process on your end?
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kraze
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Re: Curious About Update Time

Post by kraze »

Hi,

Our update process is just about 100% automatic. However when updates like these come out which are an entire game engine, they are usually big updates and the Steam content servers are overloaded. There for it takes a long time to download the update and once it's downloaded we need to roll it out to machine and servers. The second phase is usually the fastest part but can be long sometimes.

Some server companies are able to get them faster then others. It just depends on the company and which server they are pulling the update from.
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Mycologist
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Re: Curious About Update Time

Post by Mycologist »

Alright, sounds fair enough.
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Edge100x
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Re: Curious About Update Time

Post by Edge100x »

One thing that is confusing from a client perspective is that most companies do updates on a server-by-server basis, and some servers just get updates quickly due to the luck of the draw. Instead of doing this, we update all of our servers at once from a single base install. Sometimes Valve is particularly slow in sending the updates to that base install, which limits the speed of the process overall.

Valve also silently has the update tool use -verify_all for most Orangebox updates now, which slows things down because ~80000 files totaling ~8 GB need to be read from disk, and that needs to be done multiple times (once for each game being updated).

Tonight's update was the slowest one I've seen in awhile.
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Re: Curious About Update Time

Post by untamed316 »

I have expressed frustration in the past about not having the option to manually update due to it taking a long time. I've also had some server issues (a few occurances where the update wouldn't unzip on my VDS) that manually reapplying the update could have resolved, without having to submit support tickets. I'm not posting this to complain. I have long since come to terms with the situation and am not angry. The one thing that does anger me is my entire friends list spam ask me why the server isn't updated 2 seconds after it comes out. :twisted:

It may take longer depending on the type of update most times, but at least it auto-updates. I don't have to be sitting at my computer or on my phone the moment a TF2 update comes out in order to hit the steamupdate button like I had to at previous hosts.
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