Windows is a big pain in the [...]

[Salmus]

Hello everybody,

 

I'm an old game hosting provider (founded in 1999), comming from Linux to Windows beacouse of tc platform.

 

I got to say that tc is great, awesome program - it's true that it has some bugs sometimes -- but it works, and this is all matters.

 

But, a great software chouse an very very buggy OS !? Why ? When I convert all my servers to windows 2003 standard - problems started to appear. Almost every single game server started to crash every single day without any reason ! No logs, no nothing -- crash without words.

 

In the past when I had Linux, I never ever had this type of problems - I even had some gameservers with uptime equal with 40-50 days -- now on windows the biggest uptime is: 2 days (if no players joined in that server)

 

I've checked memory, cpu and other hardware components -- I do not have any problems.

 

What should I do ? I'm loosing clients everyday beacouse of this very very buggy os

 

There is a setting, or something ? What I have do wrong ?

 

OS's are fully updated, drivers are updated too

 

I don't know what should I do ....

 

[Jissh]

Perhaps the it's not the OS but how either it has been configured by yourself or maybe even your conversion of files from *nix to Windows.

[ECF]

Windows is a very stable OS to run games on. I am not sure which games you are running but we have some of the world's largest GSPs running windows and TCAdmin without any problems.

 

Perhaps it may be the lack of knowlege of the windows OS? No offense but we have had many people move from linux to windows that had no idea how to operate it effeiciently.

 

Maybe if you list the games you are trying to run someone can give you some pointers.

[Salmus]

For the moment I host only HLDS based servers (Counter-Strike: 1.6, Half-Life 1, Team Fortress: Classic)

 

Maybe it's a lack of knowledge -- I worked on linux servers for more than 8 years, but never used Windows server until now - and this only beacouse I choused to use tc.

 

Some advices will be great - Thanks !

 

Servers configuration:

Intel xeon quad core x 2 || x 4 per unit + 16-32 GB DDR ECC Fully buffered memory - running windows 2003 64 bit standard R2

[studeggle]

Have you played around with -zone and -particles?

What about combing through your event viewer, there is often usefull information in there regarding application crashes.

Have you disabled DEP?

Which windows services have you disabled?

[Salmus]

1. Nope ! What does -zone & -particles ?

2. Nope, dep is activated ... - I will deactivate right now

3. None ...

[studeggle]

Yikes!!! no wonder your having so much trouble.

Zone can help to stabelize servers suffering from script memory errors, a common setting is 1024 but I reccomend playing with it a bit to find optimum for you.

Particles is an excelent one if your clients are using any custom maps as it can help to identify leaks in them that could be leading to a crash.

Yes, DEP in windows with games can tend to be problems, it is a nice added security feature but a lot of games and mods tend to due stuff it believes is hacking the server and therefore it shuts the game server down.

On services I STRONGLY encourage you to start researching all the services you have active, windows defualts with way more services running then is needed even for my home systems I turn of several. And I would certianly never dream of leaving all the defualts on for a gameing rig. More services equals less resources(as they are being used), and greater chance of crashing. Services realy are just applications that are set to start automatically and the more applications you have running the greater the chance one of them is going to argue with another at some point. Sorry I'm not going to get into an exact list of what we turn off, I just reccommend reviewing whats on and if you don't see a need for it try turning it off. If you go with a couple at a time you can allways reverse it and turn them back on.

[Salmus]

So ... you suggest me to start hlds with:

 

 

hlds -zone 1024 -console -game cstrike [...]

 

I have deactivated DEP -- problems still exists.