Hello, Could someone please help me with this: What issues should I consider if i'm about to create a 24/7 server application for FPS games?

Low CPU and Memory use.
Customizable ports and bandwidth settings for game server admins.
Able to run many game servers at a time.

Quote:Original post by wolfram
Hello,
Could someone please help me with this:
What issues should I consider if i'm about to create a 24/7 server application for FPS games?

What sort of "issues" are you referring to? Your question is way too general to offer any specific advice.

Really solid 24/7 needs quite a bit of server redundancy, electric generators, and 24/7 staff if you want to prevent down time. That in turn requires a lot of money for staff, much less (but still considerable) money for developing a system that nicely handles concurrent remote execution and load balancing for critical failures at one location.


If you just mean "I want to leave the computer in my basement up all night and not have it crash", then you don't really need to do anything special.

Go check on it every little while and make sure the system is still in a stable sane state. Leaking memory (as others suggested) is one problem, but there are many other resources you can leak that cause problems. Counters and timers would need to be handled properly --- there was a bug that persisted in Windows NT for several years were a timer would overflow and crash the system after 40 or so days. Many/most debug libraries (including those that ship with Visual Studio) have counters inside memory allocations, and have options to not release memory when the app tries to free it in order to track bad pointers later on. I've seen these come back and haunt developers as their debug builds work until the debugging tool hits its own limit. Locks, semaphores, or other system objects need to be treated with care so as well.

Track all of these with a good logging system. If the system crashes then the last few log entries should tell you why. If they don't, make a guess at the cause, add a lot of logging, and restart the system.

If you want a more specific answer, ask a more specific question. [smile]

There seems to be many things to consider. I'll return when I know exacly what I want to do.
Thanks for your replies!

A monitor daemon to restart your server if it aborts and probably several times a day to alleviate the usual 'accumulative' problems and allow sync/backups of game data (even if its just basic user account stuff).


A large UPS Uninterruptable Power Supply to protect from power glitches.


Remote Admin access (so you can monitor/do maintanence while on vacation ....


Bomb proof you code -- no dynamic allocations ( HERESY!!!)