There's been quite a bit of discussion, both on the server and elsewhere, about the sometimes frequent appearance and disappearance of trains on the server. Having chatted with a few staff, it seems the cause is somewhat baffling!
On the client side, it seems that the cause of trains disappearing is that Run 8 assumes a train is deleted/removed if it doesn't hear about it from the server within a certain time (looking at the Run 8 log files, perhaps ten seconds). I've observed that there is indeed a drop off in network traffic each time this occurs. It also commonly happens when a new player logs in, but I suspect it can also happen when someone moves to a busy area (e.g. teleporting to Barstow). This suggests the server is busy doing something rather than providing regular updates to existing players, but it's not clear what that is, or why it's only started lately.
From some numbers read off from the server side, it didn't seem that CPU or RAM are particular issues (and the server was once quite happy on the same hardware). A few other things come to mind - apologies if these are all things that the staff have investigated.
- As a possibly easy answer, has the server host company been contacted? This wouldn't be the first case I've heard of where weird server issues came from a problem that the host can identify and fix easily once they know it's there.
- On a similar note, is the host applying some sort of network throttling? The server will send out a lot of traffic at once when a player logs in/loads a new area, and perhaps the host is limiting network traffic to a given rate (not that Run 8 seems to use a very large amount of network bandwidth at all).
- What size is the Run 8 logfile, and if large, does deleting it help? I've noticed today that my local log file has never been cleared, and perhaps Run 8 never does so, meaning the server is struggling writing log info. (Edit: I've just spotted what appears to be the config file for Run 8's logging, and it seems it limits the file to 5MB in size).
- Is the save file unreasonably large? I think it lives in "Content\V2Routes\Regions\SouthernCA\AutoSaves". I wonder if Run 8 is storing some extra data that accrues over time (a blank entry for every train that ever existed, or similar?). This one doesn't strike me as terribly likely, but it's possible.
- Also on the file size issue, is the host short on disk space? I expect this one's been checked a long time ago, and I'd expect things just not to run.
