Reproduction Steps
Hoping there’s internal Roblox logs for this, as it is no longer occurring. My intent of reporting this is to make sure it is identified and to make sure this does not happen to my experience or other experiences in the future.
I don’t believe this was a DDoS attack and I am pretty certain the player drop was not from players going to sleep. I received several user reports about the inability to successfully join + teleport. I can correlate this with an abnormal player count dip on numerous trackers (Roblox Creator Dashboard, Roblox Developer Stats, Rolimons) for the affected hour. Without server logs though, all my guesses are speculation.
Expected Behavior
Players are able to join and teleport within my experience
Players are able to join and teleport within other experiences
My player count stays at its expected number for the time of day (it doesn’t massively deviate from the usual trend)
Actual Behavior
Players are unable to join my experience - they receive a connection failed error with the ID of 17
Players are unable to teleport within my experience
My player count drops from ~50 players to ~5 players in the span of ~10 minutes
Players are still able to join and teleport within other experiences at this time, meaning this server issue was likely isolated
Workaround
Time. For some reason this error only lasted for about an hour. My player count returned to the expected number and I stopped receiving reports.
Issue Area: Engine Issue Type: Connectivity Impact: Very High Frequency: Very Rarely Date First Experienced: 2022-01-09 23:00:00 (-05:00) Date Last Experienced: 2022-01-09 23:59:00 (-05:00)
Doesn’t look like it affected my experience this time. Unless you’re referring to a platform-wide player drop, it looks like it may only affect various experiences (or maybe servers/regions) relatively randomly?
Would you mind linking your affected experience for context? Also about what time did it start?
Guessing the server cause it may not be a bad guess. However, I may not be thinking it would be a specific experience, I’d rather think it would be the server region that could potentially have the error. It is unclear what would be the root cause of it.
I mainly got the error from this game join any server for the first time is fine, mostly getting the error if they were to teleport me to another server, especially for this experience as there are different maps that are based on servers, not place.
This is what could’ve happened when changing servers in that experience.
It is hard to believe it would be the server region, as this happened frequently not happening straight away, it may also be because of Roblox launcher is having a hard time connecting with the server origin.
Can confirm. It has been happening in my experience and causes huge player drops, unsure whatever the cause is, but I have it had happen three times in public servers so far.
This issue is currently happening in Starscape as well, with significantly increased frequency today. Huge negative to our player experience. Investment in reliability should be Roblox’s top priority.
Presumably had another bout of this today for TDTNTOR 2 for about an hour. These occurrences really make it difficult to keep a concurrent player count.
I believe me and some others found the issue behind these crashes:
Games that explicitly use a lot of animations suffer currently from a high rate of server crashes as animations do not get unloaded on stopping a track on the server, which leads to animation data stacking up and after some time crashing the server (and potentially client). Specifically games with over hundreds of socialising actions and dancing choreography are suffering a lot from this issue.
I’ve reported this issue to people who have direct contact to roblox in hopes of this issue being addressed, as it’s been almost a week with this issue standing. There have been hourly crashes I cannot prevent, worst part being left out with no alternatives or workarounds.
I expect reliability from roblox when it comes to such game-breaking issues, even if there aren’t many games that are fully dependant on animations some of us still need the sufficient support.
obviously, I could be fully wrong about the above being reasoning for the server crashes, but considering @lexandstuff’s game “Splash” is affected (which is as far as I know using a lot of animations) and aswell as my game (which contains 900+ individual animations players can use at any moment), i’m very certain this could be the issue.
Interesting theory! Seems plausible. Hopefully Roblox staff will be able to weigh in.
FWIW my experience does not utilize large quantities of animations. Maybe it could still accumulate via the default player animation scripts. Players constantly visit the root place, so an animation memory leak from those scripts would actually make a lot of sense.
Both times for me have been off-peak hours, when most servers have already naturally closed - meaning the default animation scripts could overload the small number of servers (or server singular) more easily.
Unfortunately, in our case it’s happening on our Portal server, which is simply a landing place with a full screen gui that directs people to our other places. There should be very few animations playing on this server. Players should only be spending 10-20 seconds in the place, so potentially something to do with default player animations accumulating as @cloakedyoshi mentioned.
I have personally not experienced it or had it reported to me since January 24th. Unsure if it is resolved. It appeared to be something with a specific “corrupt” server for an experience.
If it helps in the meantime, you can solve this bug by manually shutting down that server. It may happen again in the future, but it’ll stop it for the time being.
