I heard running a server of the game with an onboard nic is the root of all evil for a FL server.. if this is the case , install a pci Nic... hope that helps you

I see the same behavior with a PCI NIC

dont think that is what it is.

why on earth would an onboard NIC cause problems?

at the level of DirectPlay it shouldn't care one way or the other as Freelancer is talking to the DirectX API which is in turn talking to drivers.

So either there is a bug in the DirectX API or what you said is hogwash about the PCI NIC

Yea, the PCI NIC his hogwash. I have 2 PCI 3COM 905C's in mine and it crashes about every 24 hours. I'll have to monitor the memory usage and see what is happing there.

I don't think there is a Memory leak..at least none that i can tell. A memory leak wouldn't just crash the erver. I would crash the whole comp. Jsut due to the fact that it is out of memory. It is perfectly logical though that the server would need more memory due to more people being on. I can run 50+ people for about 30hours and nothing bad happens. But when there are 20-40 sometimes it just blows up.... even wheen the server was just rebooted. So i'm not thinking there is a memory leak.

Running 2K Advanced Server - No Problems whatsoever. Dual Amd 1.2 Tyan board, 1G DDR, Raid, LinkSys LNE100 PCI n busmaster slot, SMC 8pt router in the DMZ. I have also altered the MTU/TCP-IP stack to a larger size as a cable modem tweak. I admit I was scared s-less to install dx9, since it also hosts like 10 websites and a CounterStrike server. Our FLServer uses between 50-100 mb ram with 8 people connected... but everything seems to work fine. I wonder what info could gleened from DxDiag? 2k Server is easy to change NICs, not at all a hassle like NT4, so perhaps borrow a friends nic and do a swap/experiment... it would rule out the nic drivers as a source of the problem. There is a MS Knowledgebase article regarding onboard nics and DirectPlay (9) and another article on disabling UniversalPlug-Play to get LinkSys routers to work. Those articles though, seemed to describe binary problems - either it work or it dont . Our server crashes whenever someone (client) connects with MODIFIED INI's... perhaps you got the same person connecting to your server daily, like after work or something, crashing it as soon as they connect... ???



Edited by - andymidi on 15-03-2003 02:57:46

I run a server with 2 PCI nic's and I don't crash at all! Disabled my onboard and never had a crash or anything since. So it was the root of evil for me. and for many others. PCI is good.

XP
512megs
SCSI UW drives
athlon 1700+
geforce4 Ti4200

running server and client..

my server has been up for about 30 hours now longest its ever been up

it is using up 170MB of memory with 8 people on it right now

I think there may be a memory leak because it had about 150MB of memory yesterday with 16 on.

Sith, am I reading you right? You had 50 people on the server at one time?

Want to tell Microsoft to improve Freelancer?
http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/su ... us&gssnb=1

RearAdmiral: What daemon did you install to restart the server?

I have had 50 on it... the most i have had was like 54 or 55.

Well, no, in a protected mode operating system, the machine won't crash due to running out of memory. It will simply not allocate any more memory to processes that are requesting it, i.e. Freelancer with its memory issues, and that causes the Freelancer process to crash and burn.

I think a lot of you that aren't having problems aren't running enough people on the server at once to see any problems.

The fact that it crashes like clockwork after the exact same amount of time indicates a memory leak to me.

The PCI vs. Onboard thing is not an issue, DirectPlay -> DirectX -> Drivers -> System, if throwing a PCI NIC in your machine fixed the problem it means that your onboard NIC was a piece of junk or it didn't have the correct drivers installed for it.

Anyway, is there word of a patch? This is pretty ridiculous.

well I've been up about 43 hours now and the memory has stayed constant at 170MB for the last 22 hours so I am beginning to think it might NOT be a memory leak and may be something else entirely.

The fact that my server has been up almost 2 days straight now with a 16 player limit is pretty good.

RearAdmiralPants please answer me...

ok now I am at 55 hours and am using 185MB of memory with only 4 people on the server.

so maybe there is a slow memory leak or one that only happens sometimes, maybe it doesn't deallocate memory when people log off the server?

but the memory leak is not a very big one if it is there, I am almost at 3 days up and running and so far the stability issues seemed to be FULLY related to the number of clients I was allowing on the server.