Lagless Server Backups
 

It's ridiculous right now on Zodiac, can you please setup a backup that doesn't lag the entire Playerworlds machine every time it's going.

Is this what's causing the insane lag issues I'm currently experiencing?

Top 10 of npcs taken most CPU time:
1. 73.973551591 % *Beer

If so then it's what causes calling multiple SQLite queries at the same time to heavily inflate /stats results.

Era was terrible an hour ago as well. This really needs to be fixed.

I'm sorry, but does anyone else see the humor in this? XD

While you're at it, make it so that when someone with multiple folder rights and folder depth rights opens File Browser, it doesn't freeze the entire server until it is fully loaded for 1 person. Perhaps load each folder like FTP works: Load only what is necessary to load, not every single file you have rights to see at once. This probably requires a new RC version, so I won't hold my breath.

It's for this reason that I try to be fairly precise with RC rights, and specifically avoid:

rw *
rw */*
rw */*/*
rw */*/*/*

So many people have rights to UN's levels, could this be why there is frequent, but intermittent lag spikes that go on for X amount of times, usually when there are lots of staff on? :O

That might be specific to UN but this thread is about when their backup software/script runs and completely ****s everyone on the machine while it's running.

Heh, single threaded server. What is this, amateur hour?

"bump" because I was going to post the CPU percentage from /stats to prove how bad the lag is right now, but the top cpu list hasn't arrived yet.

Reminds me of that one time on Era, when the #1 CPU usage was 161%.

At the very least, what about moving the backups to 4 AM EST, or some time when the playercount isn't fairly high?

Should just have the server use an external application or a parallel drive to make backups instead.

I like how Stefan responded to a thread about proper putexplosion usage but hasn't acknowledged this one.

Your post needs to be more explosive. ;)

bump

Hm, maybe you should lay off the alcohol...

Bump because it's ridiculous on Era right now. At least move the backups to a time when we don't have 80 players on if you won't fix them.

Same lag on Classic.

I'm wondering if these backups are backing up absolutely everything uploaded to a server.
While most of the contents of the levels folder, plus the scripts, npcs, weapons, databases and accounts folder would be essential, folders such as logs, temporary folders and personaluploads might not be.

Classic happens to have a copy of the pre-wipe account files uploaded in a separate folder, which is roughly 377 megabytes and something we never use, plus a folder specifically for manual backups which is rarely added to.

Perhaps there could be a form of serveroption to specify non-default folders which should be included in backups.

stefan's been messing around with it so i think something is being done about it?

Stefan's been logging on to Zodiac the last couple days and providing info about it.

By the sounds of it they're re-seeding the entire backup, as too many garbage files (in particular *.arc on certain servers) caused the backup to break down.

*.arc files will no longer be backed up automatically as well I've heard.

if you back up arcs

you're gonna have a bad time

I hope he knows arc files are being used on some servers for other things than just GBall. Ideally he should have just made it known that the folder "backups" should be used for that stuff since it's not included in his server backups.