Game mode: Online Private Server - No Mods
Problem: Random Crashes For The Past 2 Weeks
** WE THINK ITS BEEN RESOLVED ON OUR SERVER **
Since the patch just before the MOAP rolled out, our private server had been crashing 5-6 times a day.
It was totally random, didn’t matter how many players were connected or the time of day.
Going through the event logs in the server, each time seemed to be caused by a different error.
Various suggestions had been put forward as to the cause with the biggest recognised cause being the boss in the volcano. Others speculated about placing thralls into a wheel, our own observation regarding the destruction of buildings and a few others.
The evening of the patch to fix the volcano boss issue (10th), our server was still crashing after the patch went in, there seemed to be no end to it.
I had been running the database checker tool before each boot up with Zero errors found.
Then…
One of our players noticed a big problem with his base, a huge tower base was half destroyed for no reason. So we decided as a community that we’d roll back the server from 10pm to 9pm GMT to see if we could restore his building.
At first we closed down the server and just renamed the game.db file from the one backed up 1 hour previously, this did not restore the building and everyone was still in the original positions. We tried another file with the same result.
On the 3rd attempt to roll back the server, I deleted all 3 of these files:
game.db
game.db-shm
game.db-wal
and renaming just the 8.55pm backup to be the new game.db file.
Booted up the server, which rebuilt the game.db-wal and -shm files and the rollback was complete.
To our surprise, our server has NOT crashed in 3 days and the server has been busier than ever.
It would be nice to know what the -wal and the -shm versions of the game.db file do, I suspect they are some kind of cache but if anyone knows, please let me know.
I hope this helps someone else fix their server and maybe help Funcom find where the issue may be.