Random, Involuntary Multiple-Player Mass Quits/Rejoins

[IBN05-GMan]

I've been searching through these forums for quite a while now trying to find anything like this being reported, but haven't so far (sry if I missed it) so I'm posting this new thread. I've come across a couple of posts that are similar (RE: 'timeouts', 'single disconnects', 'unexplainable kicks', etc.), but none that cover the following issue:

Newest TSpeak Server app running (as clan) on a remote Linux server at a data center (beaucoup bandwidth, with excellent ping times)
Server carries many different channels (around 70), all with some players inside, some with 1-2, some with 60+ at all times, avg number of players on server is 200-250.

At random times, often hours or even days apart, the server will simply drop many multiple player connections simultaneously, without warning, and without displaying any errors on any of the clients. They simply get dumped, all at the same time and then "most" immediately reconnect, again all at the same time. However, some players do not automatically reconnect in this way once disconnected, and even players with 'Auto-Reconnect' selected don't always reconnect. This happens to 20-30 or more players sometimes, all quitting and then rejoining within a matter of seconds (2-5). Dumped players are from anywhere on the server (any channels), while other players in the same channels are not affected and remain normal.

There is no error displayed on the dropped clients (they simply reconnect right away), and the server chat window shows these players as a normal 'quit' (all with the exact same time stamp) and then with normal 'joined' as they all come right back on, all of this with NO user intervention.

TSpeak continues to function normally for all other players left connected.

This has been happening while using two different data centers, so the cause isn't related (it seems) to the hosting server provider.

One theory was that all dropped players were using the same ISP and that ISP had a hiccup downstream some where, but research has proven that this is not the case. Players located all over the US with different ISP's are affected at the same time, and IP addys they're using are quite different.

Wondering if anyone has witnessed anything like this, and if so, what to check or change to try and resolve this issue.

Thanks for reading.

[BHKai]

Is the server doing anything else? Ie is also a game server?

[IBN05-GMan]

Yes, but no...

Yes, it also hosts several personal web sites (Joomla based), but no game servers. We did recently turn up an Icecast Server, but this issue had been occurring long before that happened.

The server really isn't being pushed to any sort of limits regarding BW or overall activity in general as far as we can tell. When it's running (in between these brief/sporadic dumps) it's golden.

Thanks for the reply.

[BHKai]

Could you get one of them to post their log?

[IBN05-GMan]

Will try that after the next one hits... just don't know when that will be though...

Thanks again.

[Katana*GFR*]

How long is the server ( the big thing ) not TS, online?

I just had that also, and a full reboot of the server + a switch reset ( done by the host ) did the job for me..

[IBN05-GMan]

The server runs 24/7/365 of course, and TS does too as long as we don't need to restart it for any reason (maintenance, etc.).

It's been running for many days now.

What was the switch that needed reset? A hardware Ethernet switch, or a software type switch setting (/s, -p, etc.)?

Thanks.

[Katana*GFR*]

Hardware according to my host..

[maggy]

I believe we saw something about this before and the problem was that the server's clock was falling out of sync. Try searching for it.

[Peter]

Yes, the clock would be my first suspicion, if it jumps (either because the hardware is faulty or the admin wrote a stupid script that resets the hardware clock to the "right" time every X hours, you are bound to get people droping.