Linux and Ultima Online

Jason Spangler (jasons@usemail.com)
Sun, 08 Mar 1998 21:45:43 +0000


Hello,

I hope this is the right place to ask this, if not just say so...

We're trying to get the server side of Ultima Online (see http://www.owo.com/
for info) running under Linux (the client has run under Linux for quite some
time now).

Currently, one world for UO consists of around 20 processes running on 6 dual
Sparc 300mhz processor Sun Ultra 2 boxes with 512MB RAM.

We're *this* close to everything running on 6 Dell dual processor Pentium
II/300mhz boxes with 512MB RAM (we could run in 256MB RAM under Linux because of
copy-on-write pages, but went with 512MB to be safe).

Some info on our systems: 2.1.89, Red Hat 5.0 with errata updates, and all other
2.1 required program updates except NFS stuff since it didn't compile under
glibc. We are trying 2.1.89 because of better SMP reliability.

Here are the current problems:

- Page starvation?

There is plenty of free memory available (real and virtual), but we get
occasional crashes in glibc while in a new or malloc. I've read some old info
on page starvation and changing some settings in /proc/sys/vm/freepages.

- Sleeping network intensive processes?

All of the server processes (and clients connecting to userservers) use TCP to
communicate. Occasionally some processes get stuck in a recv and go into the
sleep state permanently. I just tried turning off SYN attack detection and this
has seemed to go away, but it has only been running for a few hours. This can't
be a permanent solution, though, since we need to be invulnerable to SYN
attacks.

Any help/hints/info would be greatly appreciated... Thanks!

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Jason Spangler                  http://purl.org/NET/JasonSpangler/Home
I am quoteless for now...                           jasons@usemail.com

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