Ragnarok - Custom Beacons (Supply Crates) = Server Lag/Rubber Banding

[GT500]

Some friends of mine have a Ragnarok server that has major rubber banding if Game.ini contains ConfigOverrideSupplyCrateItems entries to customize beacons (the supply crates that drop from the sky). Their server is rented from a hosting service, and runs on Windows. I've been trying to test this on my Linux (CentOS 7 x86_64) server, and while it doesn't lag/rubber band anywhere near as bad, it does have the issue as well. I assume the issue is not as bad because my Linux server has two Intel Xeon E5-2620 (hexacore) processors.

Note that this issue did not happen on my server (or rented servers) when the map was set to The Center or Scorched Earth, which has caused speculation that it's a Ragnarok related issue, however I have not been able to find other server admins complaining about it, so I am a bit skeptical and am thinking it's a configuration issue.

While troubleshooting, I've noticed that the server will do the majority of its work in a single thread, even though it creates more than 10 threads. When the primary thread pegs the CPU core it is running in at 100%, everything in the server seems to stop (although players will still be able to move around they can't build things, switch weapons, or move inventory items), and when the CPU usage of that core drops back down below 100% everything in the server resumes, thus causing a "rubber band" effect as players are returned to wherever they were when the CPU core's usage was pushed to 100%. Note that using -USEALLAVAILABLECORES or -allcores in the command line seems to make this worse.

We've noticed that removing all ConfigOverrideSupplyCrateItems entries from Game.ini seems to resolve this problem, however I have not been able to find any other way of fixing it. I can reduce the severity of the rubber banding effect by reducing the number of things in the ConfigOverrideSupplyCrateItems lines, and I can reduce the frequency by removing lines for beacons that spawn more frequently, however nothing I have tried has solved the problem.

I've tried removing all mods from ActiveMods and removing unnecessary lines from Game.ini, and that hasn't helped either. Below are links to my config files (slightly censored for public view) if anyone wants to see them. I've made the extensions .txt so that some browsers will open them instead of trying to save them. Note that these are the config files I started with (only a few minor changes from what my friends are using on their server), and not the stripped-down versions I made while troubleshooting.

• Server Start Script
• GameUserSettings.ini
• Game.ini

Does anyone have any clue what might be causing this? Is it actually a map-related issue?

 

For the sake of making things easy, these are the mods listed in ActiveMods:

• HG Stacking Mod 10000-90 V1.3 (my friends' server uses the HG 5000 stacking mod, but that causes lag when harvest rates are set high, so I switched to this one while testing)
• Structures Plus (S+)
• Ark Steampunk Mod
• Stargate Worlds [SGw] v2.2 (previously SGA)
• Deadly Weapons!
• FloatingFoundations +Clouds
• Grappling Flare Gun v1.01
• Cute Hair
• Boss Spawner for The Center (I was told this was removed, not sure what it's doing here)
• [discontinued] Craftable Artifacts/Body parts! (I was told this was removed, not sure what it's doing here)
• Upgrade Station v1.8h
• Classic Flyers

My friends' server has 3 or 4 mods in addition to this, but I had already removed those from the config when I set up this test server.

[GT500]

Removing all LevelExperienceRampOverrides, OverridePlayerLevelEngramPoints, and DinoSpawnWeightMultipliers entries from the config file seems to allow me to use ConfigOverrideSupplyCrateItems without rubber banding every time a beacon spawns.

I guess the server must re-parse the entire Game.ini file when it spawns a beacon?

It's unfortunate that there isn't a simple "engram multiplier" variable, so that I don't have to have 500 lines of "OverridePlayerLevelEngramPoints" entries if I want the max level to be 500...

[Bender8887]

Hi I see you have done a lot of testing trying to solve and workaround your issue if I may this might sound strange but the only time I've had any sort of rubber band happen due to .ini settings is when the server Harvestamountmultiplier= is set to a value greater than 1 I can't explain why they even have that code in there to mess with I'm guessing it's just for their benefit for evo events for a quick on the fly change but anyhow I hope this helps if your still running a server  as an example of how to boost your rates and still run custom drops,levels,engram overrides,per point overrides ect. this should solve your problem in the game.ini you place all your resources in a format like this 

HarvestResourceItemAmountClassMultipliers=(ClassName="PrimalItemConsumable_WyvernMilk_C",Multiplier=5.0)
HarvestResourceItemAmountClassMultipliers=(ClassName="PrimalItemConsumable_CactusSap_C",Multiplier=3.0)
HarvestResourceItemAmountClassMultipliers=(ClassName="PrimalItemConsumable_Honey_C",Multiplier=3.0)
HarvestResourceItemAmountClassMultipliers=(ClassName="PrimalItemResource_Silk_C",Multiplier=3.0)
HarvestResourceItemAmountClassMultipliers=(ClassName="PrimalItemResource_Sulfur_C",Multiplier=3.0) 

I've safely ran 27 mods with 50x harvest and all the above mentioned ini modifications and yes it included custom spawn weights and with and without custom dinomapping

if you need a more complete list let me know and I'll add the rest of what I have

[GT500]

Thanks for the info. I haven't been able to play in my server recently due to a dead video card, but if I do manage to get it replaced and this rubber banding is still an issue (and the recent changes to how beacon spawn overrides work doesn't help) then I will certainly look into this.

[GT500]

On 11/6/2017 at 2:03 PM, Bender8887 said:

HarvestResourceItemAmountClassMultipliers=(ClassName="PrimalItemConsumable_WyvernMilk_C",Multiplier=5.0)
HarvestResourceItemAmountClassMultipliers=(ClassName="PrimalItemConsumable_CactusSap_C",Multiplier=3.0)
HarvestResourceItemAmountClassMultipliers=(ClassName="PrimalItemConsumable_Honey_C",Multiplier=3.0)
HarvestResourceItemAmountClassMultipliers=(ClassName="PrimalItemResource_Silk_C",Multiplier=3.0)
HarvestResourceItemAmountClassMultipliers=(ClassName="PrimalItemResource_Sulfur_C",Multiplier=3.0) 

I've added lines like these to my config file (used them for everything listed at this link) and set the "HarvestAmountMultiplier" to "1". The server still rubber bands. Harvesting seemed to go nice and fast, but I noticed a lot of rubber banding when I got back to base and started trying to put metal in my forges, and it seemed to keep doing it after I was done adding things to the forges. I didn't stay logged in for more than a few minutes after that though, as I wanted to try some more modifications to the config file.

I also tried specifying only part of a "SupplyCrateClassString" for a single "ConfigOverrideSupplyCrateItems" so that I only needed one line to override all of the supply drops/beacons, however this caused some issues with the server. Its CPU usage never dropped below 100% of the core it was running in, and its memory usage kept climbing until it reached 30GB (the computer only has 32GB of RAM, so by the time I noticed and stopped the server there was 8.9GB of swap usage as well). The ARK server never stopped, so I eventually just terminated it and went back to the multiple lines of "ConfigOverrideSupplyCrateItems" that I was using before.

[Bender8887]

Hey man I've found a better way of doing that setup not as tedious anyhow. some things to note after a real quick glance at your ini's S+ crafting speeds way too high that normally won't be a issue server side but will cause problems client side shooter game locks and other random nonsense. Your game.ini is to put it simply is jacked up the order is all wrong for loading the supply crate codes are wrote out wrong they should be a continuous string vs multi line overall needs reworked and reordered have I look at what it should look like.

uploaded a copy here on discord https://discord.gg/zEb7qyK

 

[GT500]

I don't use Discord (don't have an account).

[GT500]

@Bender8887 just an FYI, the server config files have changed since the above. These are the current (censored) config files and start script:

• Start Script
• GameUserSettings.ini
• Game.ini

[Bender8887]

still same things apply on those I have no other way of uploading the files especially on here my game ini is way too big for here Discord is free I'll leave them up and on there for you or anyone else that's having trouble and one more thing I forgot to mention if you are only running on a single core of the processor you mentioned you will have trouble no way around it a 3.3ghz sandybridge era processor does not like to host ark without rubberbanding on vanilla settings so I honestly hate to try on a 2ghz ark is just to demanding for that not trying to sound like a jerk or anything just trying to point out areas that are causing you and will cause you issues good luck

[GT500]

13 hours ago, Bender8887 said:

... one more thing I forgot to mention if you are only running on a single core of the processor you mentioned you will have trouble no way around it a 3.3ghz sandybridge era processor does not like to host ark without rubberbanding on vanilla settings so I honestly hate to try on a 2ghz ark is just to demanding for that ...

If a dual Xeon server with 12 physical cores, which is capable of processing 24 simultaneous threads, can't handle running the ARK server software then it is in need of a major redesign. There's no good reason to restrict most of the workload of the ARK server software to a single thread, especially considering the fact that you can pretty much guarantee that server hardware these days is going to have multiple cores capable of running 8 or more simultaneous threads.

I pay $200 a month for this server, and that was after talking my server host into a sizable discount. The kind of processors you're talking about cost over $2,000 and there's no way my server host would give me one without a steep increase in my monthly bill. On top of that, this thing is only a year old, and I'm not redoing my server again just so that an ARK server doesn't lag every 20-30 seconds.