Connection Issues

Hello,

So this is a bit of a weird one, but a potentially a serious issue for my server. I’ve been running custom modded forge servers for nearly 4 years now, on the same machine and been using Sponge since beginning of last year; however I have never come across an issue like this and I’m at a loss at what to try next.

I recently reset one of my servers and updated it from 1.10.2 to 1.12.2, using all the latest versions of mods, SpongeForge and Forge. At the moment I have it whitelisted so only the staff can join, and immediately we noticed that if there is someone online and one of my US based staff try to join, they get intense connection lag and then time out within a couple of minutes. For context, the server is hosted in Norway and I am in the UK with no connection issues at all. However, if no one else is online, they can play absolutely fine. I also host another 1.12.2 server on the same machine and they have no problems with that one (Although it is a bit behind in Forge and SpongeForge versions).

One of the first things I tried to do to trouble shoot was remove Sponge (and all the plugins), however that just made things worse - the server just lagged like someone dropped a billion entities, making it unplayable even for me. So I tried adding SpongeForge back, but kept the plugins out. It worked fine for me, but not for them; same problem as originally stated. So I stripped down the mods from the server so only the mods which added actual items remained; same result as before.

Next step really would be to continue to strip the modpack down, however that could take all night and my US staff are currently unavailable.

Anyway, the point in this post is that I’m asking you all, as server owners, have you ever came across this problem in the past, and if so, what did you find that caused it? I just need somewhere to look from here.

This server is supposed to go live tomorrow - I’m expecting 50-200 players to join within the first few days and a lot of those will be from the Americas; hence my desparate post here :stuck_out_tongue:

Many thanks for any suggestions, input or comments.

~ Alice

Can we please know full version numbers of Sponge/Forge/MC, any log files (via Gist or pastebin), and perhaps a timing report (I think /sponge timings). If you have mods, it will be very hard for anyone to help without having this data.

SpongeForge: 1.12.2-2705-7.1.0-BETA-3136
Forge: 2705
Nucleus info (plugin and mod list): Nucleus info · GitHub
Sponge Timings: Aikar's Timings Viewer

I honestly don’t feel like this information is going to help anyone, I was more looking for people who had experienced this before. If it was something obvious or easily found, I’d have found it by now.

I understand, I just:

  1. believe in rubber duck debugging of sorts xD
  2. more wanted to see if i recognized any of the mods as ones i found being problematic on my server after updates.

Debugging is one of those scenarios, where more information typically is not bad.

You could try out Luck’s new plugin, Spark - it has WarmRoast under the hood, so it can give you somewhat better profiling than Sponge (fsvo “better”). Otherwise, you’re doing much as I would. The only other thing I can suggest is temporarily try the same setup on a fresh, new set of worlds and see if it’s related to that.

2 Likes

All the mods I have in this pack at the moment I either used in the previous 1.10.2 version of the modpack, or I’m currently using in my other 1.12.2 server, so I’m pretty confident it’s not any of the mods in particular (Unless someone REALLY screwed something up lately, haha).

I will definitely give it a go, when I saw it released I honestly didn’t really know what it was, nor had I heard of WarmRoast, but I’ll take a better look at it this time.

That was one of my next steps, just didn’t have anyone around last night to test it out at the time.

Thanks for your answers, I wrote this post kind of in a panic, I’ve spent the last three months on this update and spent the last 4 days pre-generating the map and getting it ready.

~ Alice

1 Like

So I installed Spark and ran it twice, once by myself, and again while someone else was connected, however I didn’t really understand it and there didn’t seem to be any difference.

So with one of the guys with the connection issues, we removed all the mods and plugins from the server and the clients (bar Forge and Spongeforge), and reset the map. Doing this fixed the connection issues, so we started painstakingly re-adding mods to the server and the clients a few at a time, until we found the mod which was cause, which we did… After 2-3 hours.

Anyway, it turned out it was a library mod, Hammer Core; I created an issue for it on their issue tracker: https://github.com/APengu/HammerCore/issues/58

Thank you for your patience and for your responses, and for tolerating my anxiety post!

~ Alice

2 Likes