Server: Start Tournament Failing

[VAN1SH1NG]

I am working on a new ladder and having issues where start tournament will fail.

The server will announce start tournament and it even registers in the server launcher log. However, it is not really starting. Players do not get assigned to their team and specs can join.

It seems related to the use of custom commands via custom_json_commands.txt and also affected by the number of players in the server. The more custom commands and the more players in the server, the more likely tournaments are not started properly. My custom_json_commands.txt file isn't even very long.

I believe the "tournamentStart" log entry is also not being sent to the server log when this occurs.

[lamster]

Weird -- approximately how often are you observing missing entries? (~1%, 10%, 50+%)?

Could you try clearing out your log files (everything under the log directory plus servers/log.txt and servers/command.txt), run the server, and then when a problem occurs zip up all those files (everything under log, everything under servers) and let me take a look?

[VAN1SH1NG]

OK.. so somehow I missed some really important info in the server launcher logs that pops up when this occurs.

When startTournament is called, java is throwing an error and the log is saying the server config size exceeds max allowed size.

The problem I am running into turns out to be that the more users that are in the server, the higher the server config size is (according to serverlauncher.org). If I have a good amount of users in the server my custom_json_commands.txt file has to be very small for startTournament to succeed.

Ran a test on a somewhat lengthy custom_json_commands.txt file. StartTournament fails when 5 players are team joined (if I recall correctly the error did not happen when 4 were team joined and one was in spec). With the 5 players, I got: "Server config size (1451 bytes) exceeds max allowed size (1450 bytes)". Tried adding a 6th player to check the size difference and it was 1472.

Not sure how much map list size affects this vs custom_json_commands.txt and number of players per server. But I am guessing that as is, I would be forced to either have a small map list or a only a few custom commands.

I assume this provides all the info you need, but if logs would still help I can some logs zipped up.

As is this will severly restrict what I am able to do with the server. Any ideas to get around this error?

I do currently have maps added individually to the list. I don't really mind having all the officials on the server if adding those lists will reduce the server config size. It does reduce the launcher_config.xml size, but not sure if those lists expand later and will add to the server config size anyway. (edit: tested - and did not decease config size)

It does occur 100% of the time when these conditions exist (enough custom commands + enough players in the server to push the server config size over 1450 bytes.

[lamster]

Ah... you've run into a very annoying limitation related to max packet sizes in the Altitude network protocol, sorry about that! The only workaround for now is to optimize the size of your server config packet (note that the config is composed mostly of strings, but is LZMA-compressed so similar/repeated strings are not necessarily major contributors). Here's stuff you need to know:

1) While a tournament is active, each player that is part of the tournament (but not spectators) will add 16-21 bytes to the server config size (on average I'd expect these to add ~18 bytes after compression, to be safe you should reserve 20 * 12 = 240 bytes for 12 man tournaments)

2) The name of each "custom" server command also consumes space in this packet. To minimize size try rolling several commands into one (e.g. "rank" --> prints both TBD and BALL rank instead of "rankBall" and "rankTbd") and reducing command name length ("rank" instead of "myRanking")

3) The most important contributor is the size of the map list. I'm pretty sure special strings like |ball| will not help here -- I believe special values are expanded and then the final list of strings is compressed. For huge map lists the only workarounds I can think of involve shutting down the server, updating the map list, and restarting with the new config (annoying to implement, annoying for players). For now the best solution is to remove maps that aren't needed and (if absolutely necessary) shorten the names of existing maps (tbd_star) instead of (tbd_stars_in_the_sky).

Hope that helps! Sorry about this annoying limitation.

[mikesol]

On the other hand - if you change map quickly during these situations you can sometimes spawn at the turret / get all the kills for turrets / crashes

[VAN1SH1NG]

Originally Posted by lamster

to be safe you should reserve 20 * 12 = 240 bytes for 12 man tournaments

Is there any way to check the byte size after the server launches? I am going by the size that is in the error message. Would be difficult to try to reserve at least 240 without seeing how many bytes are there.

edit: for now adding about 240 bytes of extra custom commands and testing that it doesn't error out at launch.