Maintenance - what just happened?
#1
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Hello Fearless,

I have had quite a few people ask me about the “maintenance” we just completed, so I thought I’d make a thread going into more detail about the changes we have made.

At the time of writing this, we have also had a few reports of some bugs too. I will also cover the last few things we are working on restoring and repairing still so everyone is on the same page.

FAQ

What did you do, and why?

This is probably the most asked question, so I will do my best at answering in detail.
Many of you may have noticed that in the last 3 months or so, the server was more prone to lagging and crashes. There are a few factors that go into this, but the main reason this was happening is due to the virtualisation operating system that our dedicated server was running on. We used an OS called ‘Proxmox’, which essentially allows us to virtualise separate servers within the same hardware enclosure. One for the website/forums, databases, servers, etc.

This worked fine for a while, but due to our changes in the developmental procedures and additional content, we began to hit IOPS limits on the game virtual machine (server). This is essentially how many operations the sever can do per second. Due to the nature of Proxmox being software virtualisation, we were not getting the full performance from the server.

Garry’s Mod (being a source game) can only operate on a singular core, so we must give it as much as our i9 processor can give it, too.

Moving to ESXi allowed us to get more power out of the server as it is a hardware virtualisation platform (rather than software), which allows us to bypass many of those limits and channel the hardware capabilities directly into the virtual servers. Most importantly, it allows us to have increased IOPS limits at hardware level and more power to the server from the CPU as well.

TL;DR – the game servers should run more smoothly and crash much less due to software changes.

There are a few bugs, do you know about that?

Probably, yes.

Web Server / Forums

We are currently aware of the Advanced Duplicator and Statistics pages not working, and this is because we are recreating the backend with the new systems to be more secure and seamless than before.
Advanced dupes sometimes did not show up properly after being transferred, that will be fixed shortly too.

Game Servers

The game servers should not have any further issues (bar a few lag spikes for now), so please report any bugs using the Forums and we will address anything as soon as possible.

I’m a donator, will I get any compensation for the downtime?

Yes, as the servers were down for a full 24 hours and had a few issues for the next 12 hours after that, all donators have already been given an extra 4 days of donator status.

Should we expect any further downtime?

No further prolonged downtime should happen from now on, except the occasional server restarts which are scheduled as normal.

Credits

I firstly want to thank @ScriptedBrain for his help over the past few sleepless days working on everything with me and restoring services back to normal!

Thank you to Conn for helping to initially configure the main and build servers too.

Thanks to @h3x for his support in highlighting a few security issues with a few web pages.

Finally, a huge thanks to the community for your continued patience. I hope that these changes will continue to keep the servers running smoothly in the years to come!

If you have any further questions, feel free to send me a message on Discord!


UPDATE:
The advance dupe page has been restored with a new backend and is operational again.
Regards,
Edned

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+Rep
#2
epic.
#3
We really out here finding those pesky bugs in FL

Now you lot need a good nights sleep, go get it :')
#4
Fantastic news!

All glory to the developers
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Visit my profile here.
#5
Superb news.

Happy roleplaying, everybody!
 
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#6
What do us veterans get I couldn’t play last night!!!!!
 


-Removed by Steven8ken
The following 1 user Likes Dragnort_'s post:
  • Wolven
#7
Epic and thanks!
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