Absolutely zero clue how to reproduce… happens randomly on some servers
Expected Behavior
Server should run at a proper framerate according to how long each frame takes
Actual Behavior
Server has barely any work to do yet it’s locked itself to running heartbeat every 66 ms (or 15fps). I even went as far as to delete literally everything on the server including all server scripts, yet issue still persists. I don’t think this issue is triggered by any interaction with my specific game
Issue Area: Engine Issue Type: Performance Impact: Very High Frequency: Rarely Date First Experienced: 2022-08-26 00:08:00 (-04:00) Date Last Experienced: 2022-08-26 00:08:00 (-04:00)
Could this be because of the physics stepping method? Try setting it to fixed and see if anything changes. Otherwise, it might be because of plugins. Do you have the magic wand plugin (I forgot the name)? It’s been known to cause fps drops in studio (I assume you’re in studio).
Just a bit more info, I’ve encountered this issue twice. The first time I profiled the server with 1 frame per second, so I did not realize the server was only spitting out 15 frames per second, but I noticed very strange behavior. The second time I encountered this issue, I properly profiled at 60fps, which led to me discovering the server was running at 15fps.
I suspect there’s just a server (or multiple servers) floating around that’s bugged out and running at 15 frames per second, and I’ve managed to get hit with it twice. My location is the east coast, dunno if that would be helpful at all.
Also having this issue except at 20 steps instead of 15, but still a big issue. Still random, most servers have no problem, but rarely you’re server is locked and doesn’t ever go back up.
Bump! Thanks for pinpointing the issue! This issue also contributed to “slow remote event firing” issue that I have reported earlier. Once the steps is locked in typically lower state, remote events couldn’t be handled in a standard speed and appears to be much slower in a normal / 60 steps server. (It’s very noticeable while scripting for automatic weapons)
Can also confirm that there is no way to reproduce the issue and it likes sometime the game will boot into a low performance server randomly and creates inconsistency / performance issue over different servers in the same game
I’m so thankful to see multiple people encountering this same issue. It was absolutely terrifying to see everything fail in such an inexplicable, unpredictable fashion. I hope the engineers can figure this out despite there being literally no reproduction steps (you just gotta join new servers and hope you’re cursed with the “unlucky server”
I’m glad someone posted this issue because I was having the same issue but I wasn’t sure if it was just me. Since I’m making an automated fighting game this leads to inconsistent results which can be a major problem.
We’ve encountered it in our test place a few times, it varies from 15hz, 20hz and 30hz but most servers run at 60hz.
We think this may be intentional as it could be a way of packing more games per a physical server.
Giving a game with a lower player count less resources. Luckily our game copes with it just fine.
Good to hear more people have encountered this, though I can’t agree that this would in any way be intentional. Having the server heartbeat randomly be a quarter of what it’s expected to be completely screws with the latency of your remotes, and for my experience it causes much much more severe issues since I heavily depend on server performance being reliable. Either way something like this should definitely be documented (if it is intended, which I highly doubt)
I have taken some experiment on this very distressing issue previously and objectively speaking there will be around 20 - 30% chance to encounter low performance server (15, 20, 30 steps per frame servers) while booting up the game
The script execution time will be somehow affected such as remote events or even audio sounds to be appeared to play back a slower speed
At first I thought there was some bad coding on script structure contributing to this issue randomly and found out it’s actually related to server performance being locked
if this issue only happened to games with low CCU, it will just constantly making small games run bad randomly not good no matter towards developers or players
Sorry for the confusion and frustration here - This was a test of the impact of lower server frame rates. The test was accidentally left on for much longer than we intended and has now been disabled. Thank you for bringing it up!
not good no matter towards developers or players