R18 patch news

marrr
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R18 patch news

Post by marrr »

A few RSPs will be trialling the server during this evening/morning. The new server update will begin rollout with all RSPs during Tuesday if no gotchas are found.

Changelog
Fixed the most common server crash. The story behind this one is fairly convoluted:

When a player begins the process of joining a server, the server will begin buffering some kinds of information in anticipation of the player completing the loading & joining phase. However, players sometimes get stuck in the loading screen. This makes the server buffer more and more info for that player. A side effect of this is a temporary resource leak in the game server. The leak is immediately restored if the server changes map, or the player completes loading, or the player shuts down the game client. However if a player manages to remain stuck for 30+ minutes in loading on a server with lots of activity and the server doesn’t end the round, then the server could run out of the particular resource – it would then crash.

The new server version will forcibly disconnect clients which are threatening to exhaust that particular resource. With this change in place, we do not know of anything that would make high-ticket servers less stable than normal-ticket servers.

Long banlists will not crash the server.

The banlist supports up to 10.000 entries now.
The banList.list command has been modified to return at most 100 entries at a time (similar to how BC2 PC’s banList.list command works).
Any administrative tools will need to be updated to be able to see more than the first 100 entries.

Corrections to the banlist documentation.


The new server administrator documentation can be found here: http://static.cdn.ea.com/dice/u/f/bfbc2 ... trator.zip [static.cdn.ea.com]
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/fo ... 576819897/
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Edge100x
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by Edge100x »

We've put a hold on rolling out this patch because many servers are crashing frequently when Procon is used, likely due to the new banlist code.

This is a good argument for testing things for a bit before they're globally rolled; if we'd put this out to customers, we'd be having to roll back servers right now. We try to do such testing with optional beta updates, though at least one customer has given us flak for a short bit of extra delay in the past.
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by woowoo »

Edge100x wrote:We've put a hold on rolling out this patch because many servers are crashing frequently when Procon is used, likely due to the new banlist code.

This is a good argument for testing things for a bit before they're globally rolled; if we'd put this out to customers, we'd be having to roll back servers right now. We try to do such testing with optional beta updates, though at least one customer has given us flak for a short bit of extra delay in the past.
Makes sense to me. Do we have an option to roll out early if we wanted to? I want to give procon a chance to fix this before roll out but may choose to temporarily deactivate procon if its taking too long.

Although I don't expect it to take long - I see one of the procon devs is already working on it.
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by Edge100x »

The problem with the patch is likely deeper than that -- I don't think it's a problem with Procon, but rather with the new banlist-handling code on the server side. This seems to be happening when the list is requested. We'll wait for a fix from DICE instead of trying to work around the problem, since they should have one out tomorrow morning.
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by woowoo »

Edge100x wrote:The problem with the patch is likely deeper than that -- I don't think it's a problem with Procon, but rather with the new banlist-handling code on the server side. This seems to be happening when the list is requested. We'll wait for a fix from DICE instead of trying to work around the problem, since they should have one out tomorrow morning.
Agreed - I got a similar message from the procon guys. Thanks for keeping us informed!
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by Ironman44 »

Hopefully the blaze issues will be fixed soon as that is my major complaint. We have been lucky with the disconnects untill the last few days. We went for 2 days up time to about 8 hours
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by Edge100x »

We've also been seeing more and more DDoS attacks individual customers, as the tools to launch these become more widely disseminated. If you have a server that seems to go down following a player ban or seeing a disruptive player in game, it might be a good idea to have us look at your bandwidth graph to double-check this. (Only rarely does such a DDoS attack against a single server lead to others at the location also going offline.)
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by woowoo »

Word is that R18 has been withdrawn and is being fixed and will be released as R19.
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by Edge100x »

R19 was sent to us this morning and we're currently testing it. We haven't made an official announcement yet, but if you'd like it applied to your server to help with the testing, please contact us.
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by woowoo »

Edge100x wrote:R19 was sent to us this morning and we're currently testing it. We haven't made an official announcement yet, but if you'd like it applied to your server to help with the testing, please contact us.
We wouldn't be able to test it until this evening. So if R19 looks good, when is it expected to roll out?
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by Edge100x »

Even just testing with a couple of guys or Procon running would be helpful.

We'll likely start rolling it out to empty servers automatically early this afternoon.
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by 10-78 Busterking »

Edge100x wrote:R19 was sent to us this morning and we're currently testing it. We haven't made an official announcement yet, but if you'd like it applied to your server to help with the testing, please contact us.
Seems like many are having issues with R19. I would wait for a while before rolling it out:

http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/fo ... 9161001/4/
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by Edge100x »

The PB problems appear to be separate, but to be safe, we're delaying a little longer to obtain further feedback. The R19 update fixes two crashes but nothing else, so it's not essential that it be rolled out immediately.
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by _p1_ »

We are using R19 right now.

So far no crashes, of course we still need to have a huge que like last night where we had 7 in que but then it crashed. That is when we installed R19 on two servers.

We are using ProCon but what seems to be the issue with R18 and ProCon, is it long bnan lists? I have not seen any issues so far.

The one thing myself and other clan mates noted was, it does_seem to be a little on the laggy side. Don't know if this is a misconceived perception based on network traffic etc, but all of us are from different places in the US and Canada. Time will tell on this one.
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Re: R18 patch news

Post by _p1_ »

R19 has been good so far, servers have not crashed in 3 days at all, whee we would have had at least 4-5 by now.

Running ProCon also with no ill effects.
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