Huge Tickrate and Packet Size Issues On Server

[DragonRuins]

After about 8 days of playing with ~8 friends on my Attack of the B-Team server, we suddenly started experiencing a huge spike of lag. I'm not exactly sure what caused it. At the time, I was getting Owls for the witchery mod and it started happening immediately after that. I'm not convinced it was because of that though, because I ended up killing the Owls to see if it would fix it - didn't help.

 

This is a screenshot of the server gui, which I enabled after noticing the lag problems, while I'm in my base:

 

The packet sizes are insanely large as well. At one point it was at 30,000 and the avg tick was at about 8000ms. 

 

and here's a screenshot of the server gui after teleporting away far enough so the chunks aren't rendered:

 

I've heard that redpower usually takes up a lot of memory/may  be the cause of this tick issue, but I'm not exactly sure.

 

If it's necessary, here are my system specs and down/up speeds:

CPU: AMD Phenom II x6 1090T @ ~3.6GHz

RAM: 8GB Dual-Channel DDR3@801MHz (RipJaws Ram)

Motherboard: ASRock 890FX Deluxe 3

Graphics: 2x Crossfired Radeon HD 5830 (I have tested this with crossfire on/off just in case it was screwing with something and it didn't help)

 

Download: 29mbits/s

Upload: 6mbits/s

 

I usually leave the server memory allocation at the 3gb max(I think) that the default .bat file is set to. At the time of taking those screenshots I had changed a few things to see if it would help and the memory is maxed at 1GB. These issues occurred  before changing this.

 

I tried looking through the forums to see if this was posted before and I couldn't find anything so I apologize if I managed to miss it. I also hope I included enough information. If you need anything else let me know.

Edited March 15, 2014 by DragonRuins

[DragonRuins]

Anyone have any ideas?

[Loader]

1GB for the server is way too low for that many players, once you start to run out and it starts swapping like crazy (to keep all players seeing every chunk they should) you'll get this happening.

 

Raise the -Xmx setting to 3 or 4GB.

 

Edit: it could still be something else, but start with checking that.

Edited March 22, 2014 by Loader

[DragonRuins]

I already mentioned in my post that this issue occurred before I had changed the memory allocation settings. "I usually leave the server memory allocation at the 3gb max(I think) that the default .bat file is set to. At the time of taking those screenshots I had changed a few things to see if it would help and the memory is maxed at 1GB. These issues occurred  before changing this." Also tickrate and packet size shouldn't raise to such a high level if it runs out of memory.

 

Also, I seem to have fixed most of the problem. I basically removed as many red power covers as I could and the server started running very stably again. Right now my tickrate is 12ms. I ended up packing up my base and blowing it up to be sure I got rid of all the panels and everything's all good now. So it seems like the multiblocks aren't very well optimized yet.

Edited March 23, 2014 by DragonRuins

[disconsented]

Use a profiling tool like warmroast and/or opis to figure out what is causing the huge TPS drop

[Loader]

Also tickrate and packet size shouldn't raise to such a high level if it runs out of memory.

I know it's off topic, but why?  That seems like exactly what it would do unless I'm missing something.

 

I'm glad you found it - Microblocks near power have been known to cause problems before for some people but I thought it was fixed, did you have any advanced genetics machines, conduits or aluminium wire touching them, out of curiosity?

[DragonRuins]

Yeah, I definitely had some on conduits. As for the packet size/tickrate thing, usually the tickrate skyrockets whenever the server has to calculate a lot of things going on per tick and is generally an internet connection issue as well. I'd think that if the server ran out of memory then it would just freeze calculations per tick or, what's usually happened to me, is it would crash. I'm not as familiar with packet size, but I think that packet size increases if the server has to send out more information. And 30mb of information(which is what it was at one point for me) shouldn't be caused because the server ran out of memory. I think that just because the server runs out of memory, it doesn't mean that it has more information to send to clients. But that's just my opinion on it, I may be wrong.

 

Also, the packet size was 30mb at one point, as I said, but the packet sizes never got remotely close to that big whenever I had all 8 of us connected to the server. I also run the server on the same computer in which I run the client and I haven't had any connection issues with any of my friends luckily and everything's been running smoothly. I've heard that it's not a good idea to run server and client on the same machine, but I've been doing it for years just fine for 8 people. Maybe it's because I have a 6 core processor so it can run the server calculations on the one or two extra cores and the game on four. But I'm not sure.

Edited March 23, 2014 by DragonRuins

[islands420]

java -server -Xmx6G -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:+DisableExplicitGC -XX:SurvivorRatio=85 -XX:PermSize=128M -XX:MaxPermSize=256M -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=50 -XX:+UseLargePages -XX:LargePageSizeInBytes=4m -XX:+UseAdaptiveGCBoundary -XX:+TieredCompilation -XX:+UseCodeCacheFlushing -XX:+UseGCOverheadLimit -jar BTeam.jar

pause

try this for a start up script