Connection errors

[Cheith]

It must be needing reset then. There are often more than 3 people on it, sometimes with no issues. One would suspect some form of memory allocation problem.
C.

[Misnik]

I do often get a hiccup bit of lag when someone actually logs onto the server. Normally it passes just fine. Evenso I've been on on with 3+ people before and we have had zero issues.

Last night was on mostly by myself then one person logged on and the hiccup became a long bit of bad lag. Eventually I started to time out from the server. Whatever the bug is seems somewhat random atm.

Edit: but pout can't connect atm

[DaedalusAlpha]

I do get connection errors as well, and extreme lag at times, but I can not say it's related to the number of people currently online, and therefore not the server performance. I'd rather say it's related to how congested the Australian internet line is. But whether this is on some internal Australian line or the AU-EU line I don't know.

It would be interesting to map the amount of lag and disconnect problems to user locations, maybe one could get some useful data out of that?

Apart from that I could imagine the game being worse at handling data transfer now in beta. I think Notch slim-lined the amount of data sent to clients when going into beta (which is good), but while doing so also made the whole protocol less fault tolerant (before a lot of data was probably sent double, now it's only sent once, but if that packet is lost it takes a lot of time for the client to re-sync to the server). I think the beta would do pretty well with a checkup on the network code, especially in extreme conditions such as ours where people connect from all over the world with super high latency and a lot of packet loss.

[Sorontar]

There are a lot of unknowns in terms of memory management as well as I/O. While MC might have been improved, I think things like inventory control are now managed by the server. We are using 10 Bukkit mods as well. While I don't believe they hamper each other, Bukkit has a priority system that might cause problems as well as the fact that a lot of the mods used MySQL or SQLite, not text files, to store their settings/logs. When we first turned Bukkit on for the main worlds, we were also writing logs to files, but that at least we no longer do. The mods and Bukkit are nowhere near perfect, nor are they up-to-date. However, it is very hard to keep updating and testing them without hampering your playing (and the admins' lives). Personally, I am waiting for Mojang's next update. That will force us to update Bukkit and the mods. No idea when it will occur though.

Every couple of days, the server crashes without warning. I have been noticing that sometimes it seems to be doing it around the same time that someone tries to log in. But as you have pointed out, we have had 5-6 people playing at once without problems. That happened on the survival server last night. I have restarted it.

For those who are interested, this is what the server log says about the crash...

2011-02-14 22:07:29 [WARNING] Can't keep up! Did the system time change, or is the server overloaded?
2011-02-14 22:07:38 [WARNING] Can't keep up! Did the system time change, or is the server overloaded?
2011-02-14 22:08:32 [WARNING] Can't keep up! Did the system time change, or is the server overloaded?
2011-02-14 22:08:37 [WARNING] Can't keep up! Did the system time change, or is the server overloaded?
2011-02-14 22:08:39 [INFO] Skoville [/***.***.**.***:*****] logged in with entity id 6613586
2011-02-14 22:09:34 [INFO] Stopping server

Not very helpful, hey? We often get frequent "Can't keep up" messages when there is lag, but then they stop and lag goes.

Sorontar

[exekewtable]

we got the 'can't keep up' message too before when there was no lag. Its something to do with client entities or something. Anyway, it really feels like the whole beta part of Bukkit is the problem here, so lets hope we can move on to a more minecraft/final release of the pair of them sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, the only other avenue is to go back to the vanilla no-rules worlds and run without mods (without alot of admin time to figure out what mod exactly is causing this problem).

[Sorontar]

From Notch:

During the two weeks up until GDC, we’ll be working on finishing up the new game launcher and finishing up some new game features for the game, including an official white list implementation for the server and more types of half sized blocks

.

[Thermal Ions]

Native whitelist sounds good. It'll give us a measure of comfort on the temp server between MC and Mod updates.

[Obsi]

There really should be no reason why minecraft itself can't include server settings like whitelists, the ability to modify spawn protection, warps and so on... There must be so many servers out there that use this stuff....

But if they are planning to made modding easier, something tells me they aren't going to bother wasting time making those changes to minecraft when other people's mods do it for them.

[Sorontar]

The game launcher will also be important. It will allow players to choose whether to upgrade or not. Hopefully, it will also allow multiple versions to exist on the one system.

Part of our problem is that the development is happening on three levels - Mojang, Bukkit and the mods. Eventually, they all will be able to do the same things (like whitelisting), but they also keep standing on each other's toes with upgrades. The crucial thing is that Mojang is the Ministry who define what goes, Bukkit is the teacher who sets the curriculum and interfacing and the Mods are the students, squabbling over who is better.

Sorontar

[Misnik]

The whitelist will be coming to the official end fairly soon, its one of the things that was listed in his last blog post.