[L4D] Server crashes on mapchange - sometimes

[stevieboy]

Hi everybody,

since I ran a dedicated (root) server of L4D one problem bugs me and I can't figure out what the problem is:

We play fine on the server, sometimes for hours. But then on mapchange the servers sometimes crashes and restarts (with map NM01). The lobby-session is lost too (crash, restart) and the clients wait forever to connect to the next map.

Our system:

• AMD64 QuadCore
• 64BitDebian Lenny (up-to-date)
• L4D single instance (no fork)
• several other gameserver TF2,CSS,INS on other IPs/Ports (mostly empty)
• HLStatsX Premium (maybe important due to the "rcon stats" it's performing every few seconds)
  

The normal logs are fine (no error whatsoever) and besides the random crash-on-mapchange the server runs perfectly fine (fps,ping etc).

Did anyone of you experience problems alike?

I now have more time so I started to use a debug.log. Maybe this brings light to the thing. I'm quite helpless.

Update:
Server just crashed again when changing from NM04 to NM05.

Code:

from debug.log
----------------------------------------------
CRASH: Sa 11. Apr 18:01:22 CEST 2009
Start Line: ./srcds_i486 -game left4dead +map l4d_vs_hospital01_apartment +ip 88.198.xxx.xxx -port 27015 +maxplayers 8 -pidfile /games/steamgames/l4d/left4dead/l4d.pid -debug -debuglog debug.log -fork  +map l4d_hospital01_apartment
#0  0xf7df5d7f in ?? ()
No symbol table info available.
End of Source crash report
----------------------------------------------

[spoonman184]

Running any other mods? It is in my experience that servers usually only crash when running a mod.

[stevieboy]

No, plain L4D with Metamod 1.7.1 and Sourcemod 1.2.0.

Nothing special about it I'd say. We even tried it with a vanilla L4D with no mods whatsoever and the same thing happened.

[teamhost]

Hi,

We have seen this many times its almost always caused by MODs. Try removing the mods and it should be ok.

[stevieboy]

What mods are you refering to? Like I said: The server has the same problems when using vanilla L4D and the only thing we added was MM and SM.

[pengy]

Take out the metamod.vdf file and restart the server. And he stated the mods which means all of them.

[Heimer]

I have the same problem with server crashes.
I started the server without MM and SM but it's still crashing to often so I doubt MM or SM is the reason for the crashes.
I hope the upcoming L4D update will fix that.

[stevieboy]

Today I reinstalled Debian Linux (Lenny) as 32bit-version.

I will let it run without any mods and a basic config. I hope this will show if the problems still occur.

I'll report back.

[afterhoursgaming]

This is usually due to low system memory. When you were on 64-bit debian what was your top or htop showing for total system memory. Sometimes the kernel config isn't set for bigmem support or support for memory of 4gb or higher and this makes map changes cause the server to timeout and come back.

[stevieboy]

@afterhoursgaming: Thank you for this insight. In fact I noticed that my hoster supplied the 32bit-version with a kernel having a suffix "_bigmem" which was not the case in the 64bit-image.

So hopefully you're right and with the new kernel having bigmem-support everything will be fine.

Our server has 6GB RAM so we surely need this bigmem-support although I didn't know that till now.
Thanks again.

[stevieboy]

Sadly even a Vanilla L4D-Server w/o ANY mods or changes crashes.

The only thing I noticed that in about 75% of all cases the server would be filled with random players soon after map change though we have steamgroup exclusive set to 1. Maybe the matchmaker somehow screws up and doesnt reserve the server for the lobby correctly while changing maps?

[afterhoursgaming]

Yea you said you switched to a 32bit version?? If you have 6gb of ram you should be using a 64bit OS otherwise you wont be able to use over 4gb. If you do have 64-bit OS simply configure the kernel with make menuconfig and change the memory support option form 1gb or 4gb to 64gb support save and compile you should be fine after that.