Post: #1

Hello, a friend of mine has a server and the players are experiencing this strange bug:

Every hour, for 5 minutes, the spells and skills take twice (or more) the time to cast/perform.

I would really appreciate if someone could give me ways of finding what is causing this.
I told them to check if it happens with every single spell and skill and if it happens to gms and players. I also asked them if they have a script that does something every hour but they said they don't.
There are no errors in the console.
I'm not expecting someone to give me the answer to the bug, but what else can i do to try to find the cause?. They say it happens exactly at 6:52, 7:52, 8:52, etc.

Thanks for reading.

Post: #2

they can search for "3600" or "60x60" in scripts they can use agent ransack to search all of them at once

Post: #3

i did that with no result, so its either not exactly 1 hour, or the timer is the result of adding stuff or evaluating a tag or something, not directly doing timer=3600.

Thanks for answering

Post: #4

Ask them if they have this setting set to 60 in the ini, it is used to be set as 60 (1 hour):

// Amount of minutes to call f_onserver_timer (0 disables this, default)
TimerCall=0

If they have it, tell them to check the f_onserver_timer function for possible issues (it's inside sphere_serv_triggers.scp)

Post: #5

They have it on 0.

Post: #6

Do they have the server on a host? Maybe it has scheduled a task and it hangs in it.

Post: #7

Yes, they have it on a host. I'll ask them about that.
But is it possible that a problem with the host only affects spells and skill and not general movement lag or other stuff?
Also it seems that gms are not affected by this bug.

Post: #8

Also there could be an item with timer to do that which is really hard to find

Post: #9

Hmmmm a problem which involves lag for players, only for casting, only each 1:00:00 hour ... looks like a conspiration

There was a problem (should be fixed now) involving casting/skill's success in latest builds making them to finish in the next tick (0.1~s) after it should, but it should happen everytime and not like this.

Do they use the Webpage Generator inside sphere.ini with a 60minutes delay? It must be something like that being called each 60min and blocking cast, walking checks, AFAIK, have a buffer to store movements in case of lag or problems like this so it may make this unoticeable. It sounds me much like a host 'problem', some tasks schedulled each hour by host owners or another hosted client ... maybe they should contact the host manager if they are sure that no scripts are causing this.