Zelaron Gaming Forum - Americas Army news.

This was written by some gamespy dude and explains why the server list are always small on gamespy...... currently the patch to fix this is coming out ASAP

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We've been looking into some of the problems people have been reporting with America's Army: Operations and have a bit of information to share that may explain both the sporadic server lists and the network traffic users are seeing after closing Arcade or GameSpy 3D.

We did some packet snooping on machines that just ran Arcade to retrieve a server list and believe that the problem is extraneous network traffic that AA:O game servers are causing.

It appears that any contact to a game server by a potential user - even if that user is only retrieving up to date server list related info - triggers a connection attempt from the game server to that user's machine on a port that the user's machine not expecting contact on. This, in turn, is triggering an ICMP error response to be sent back to the game server. This extraneous network traffic is swamping the game servers - already taxed by the game's popularity.

GameSpy Arcade will wait a couple of seconds to get a response from the game server and, if it doesn't, assume that the server isn't up or behaving reliably enough for a user to want to connect to, thus it doesn't list it. Due to the extra network traffic caused by the ICMP messages, the server is simply getting flooded with too much information and the query response it sends to clients just isn't getting enough priority to respond within Arcade's time-out period.

This explains both the sporadic server lists and the network traffic users are seeing after closing Arcade or GameSpy 3D.

It's important to stress here that this is not a problem with a scalability limit of the master server/game server/end user model being hit. This is the same model used by Half-Life, Quake 3 and nearly all other dedicated server games.

It's not unusual to see 5-10 requests for this kind of info a second with Half-Life, which currently has approximately 20,000 game servers and has over 60,000 players. America's Army, on the other hand, has only 80-100 servers (fewer than 1600 slots) and more than 3000 people who want to play at any given time.

AA:O, it seems, is just too popular for its own good! High demand combined with the ICMP traffic are simply bogging the servers down.

It also appears that the way a client connecting to a full server is handled may be causing additional problems. Rather than rejecting the connection out-right as soon as the sever is full, the client must go through the entire connection process before receiving the rejection message. Negotiating that connection is fairly CPU-intensive and further taxes the game server.

Hope this helps to explain some of the problems you are seeing with America's Army: Operations. We've passed our findings on to the folks at the Army and are continuing to work with them as they update and improve the game. They've already made several changes and are testing a patch internally that enhances network performance by reducing CPU usage.

Thanks!

Todd "Tungsten" Northcutt
Game Play Product Manager