SteamCmd Download Timeout

[Tim.M]

Hi, recently we migrated servers and have started runing into issues downloading large Arma 3 mods, where the downloads consistently time out and fail after 5 minutes. The timeout appears to be a SteamCMD limitation, however this wasnt causing issues before and upon further invesitgation the download speed of SteamCMD appears to be geting throttled.

 

However if the download is preformed via a custom script it saturates our connection and downloads successfuly.

Edited March 21, 2023 by Tim.M

[Gardiny]

We have the exact same problem for 2 years with TCAdmin, but no one plans to fix it. We have tested it exactly the same way and the problem is only through downloads in TCAdmin.

The only thing that works for this is to click "Start" again, sometimes repeatedly, and most importantly for the game in question, deleting the steamapps directory must be turned off in the settings, otherwise the installation always ends up with an error.

We ticketed Luis on this, he tried it on a few mods for another game where it didn't go through, but beyond that it was unresponsive and unanswered for 4 months and then the ticket closed itself

 

 

Edited March 20, 2023 by Gardiny

[Tim.M]

I just removed the script events from a few months ago that were part of the temporary SteamCMD fix since that’s now supposedly been fixed.

And I tried the multiple download retries and that works. I knew it worked manually through the SteamCMD CLI by reissuing the download command, but I didn’t expect it to work through TCAdmin although the temporary script fix would have stopped it regardless. Scheduled workshop updates are still broken however because they just fail with no redownload attempts.

 

I have also now observed a significant CPU utilisation difference between when the download is preformed manually vs via TCAdmin. TCAdmin appears to be limiting the download to a single core where the manual method is multithreaded. This would somewhat explain why we only started having these issues after migrating servers since our old server had higher single core speeds than our current one, so I’m starting to think this may be a multithreading issue.

[Dennis]

The script was only meant as a temporary workaround and I even think SteamCMD fixed the issue shortly after.

On 3/21/2023 at 5:20 AM, Tim.M said:

TCAdmin appears to be limiting the download to a single core where the manual method is multithreaded.

That's because TCAdmin only uses a single core AFAIK. This is to prevent 100% CPU usage when installing large mods - that would effect the performance of running game servers negatively, and a single user could potentially ruin the experience for all of your clients on the same server.

Also note that there could be a difference in which SteamCMD executable is being used. If you have 'Execute as the service's user' checked in the Steam Settings for the game, SteamCMD will execute from C:\TCAFiles\Users\SteamCmd. If it's not checked, it would execute from C:\Program Files\TCAdmin2\Monitor\Tools\SteamCmd.

We've had massive issues with SteamCMD installations getting corrupt when it wasn't executed by the user (meaning C:\Program Files\TCAdmin2\Monitor\Tools\SteamCmd was used). We constantly had to reinstall SteamCMD.

Could you confirm whether or not SteamCMD is configured to be executed by the service's user in the game settings?

[Tim.M]

13 hours ago, Dennis said:

Could you confirm whether or not SteamCMD is configured to be executed by the service's user in the game settings?

It was not and configuring it appears to have fixed the issue.

 

14 hours ago, Dennis said:

This is to prevent 100% CPU usage when installing large mods - that would effect the performance of running game servers negatively, and a single user could potentially ruin the experience for all of your clients on the same server.

We are only a single gaming community and don’t do any reselling or anything along those lines and the small number of admins with the ability to install/update mods know better than to attempt it whilst the server is full. Also almost all of our updates are automated during off-peak hours so its quite rare for any mods to be manually updated to begin with.

 

Thanks for the assistance.