tl/dr: Server started lagging badly a week or two ago out of nowhere, despite no significant changes. CPU usage became volatile, but there doesn't seem to be any reason as to why. Host has no ideas. Please help.

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My server has been getting hit with lag & mass disconnects for about a week or two now, and it's been getting progressively worse. There's been general instability, crashes, etc. since the Unity update, but that's been happening to mostly everyone. This began after that, and I can't for the life of me figure out what could be causing it. The host has pretty much given the all clear as far as the network goes, but they noticed my CPU usage became volatile about a week ago (March 3/4). You can see what I mean here:



The only thing that changed around that time is I installed NTeleportation (used by admins only, a few times a day) and Discord API for Raid Tracker (which also only gets called a few times a day). I uninstalled both of these a couple days ago and it made no difference:


Other than that, nothing has changed. My map size is 4300, my population is relatively low (avg 30-40, max 50), the map just wiped on Thursday, no new plugins/updates, no configuration changes... nothing. After four months of no issues, it just showed up out of nowhere. Most of the time what happens is I'll get about 10-20 minutes of lag out of nowhere, several times a day. It ranges from rubberbanding to complete unresponsiveness. Sometimes it clears up, and sometimes it kicks everyone on the server, with these error messages:
"[EAC] Kicking _____ (Excessive packet loss)"
"[EAC] Kicking _____ (Connection timed out)"

I'm at a complete loss and I have no idea what could be causing it, nor does my host. If anyone has any ideas, I'd really appreciate it.

I know exactly what you mean. Who is your server host?

looks like Streamline dashboard, ask them to change your server to another "machine" to see if its the hosts cpu/memory.  They did that for me once without much trouble.

My host is Streamline as well. Has yours always been that bad, or is that recent? What does your CPU activity look like from the past few weeks in 'stats'?

They offered to move my server to different hardware, but I want that to be a last resort because it's going to require an IP change, meaning new server essentially. I just did that a few months ago and if it doesn't fix it, I'll just end up needing to do it again when I switch hosts... which sucks.

Thanks for the quote but they actually managed to do it without much trouble and the changeover went smoothly, As i was using RustiO the players found the server with no problems, it turned out to be a malfunctioning rack,

Yeah, it's a Streamline panel. I'll hit them up and see what they say.

Seems we all are in this same boat and i use a different host than all of you.

Watching this thread

The right hand side of the red line is after the server host switched me to different hardware. But I am still having random MASSIVE lag spikes for players that last anywhere from 5 secs to 1min, and it ends up kicking them then EAC temp banning them sometimes. Just about had a gutful ...... 




Merged post



See what I mean??

Experiencing heavy RAM usage since March 7th rust update on my server, without any big changes to plugins,configs,etc... But with CPU it's all stable, for now... (March 7th rust update redline)