BF3 PC Server R19 will roll out on Wed Jan 25th

Server R18 had a crashbug in it. We have resolved it, and will soon send out server R19 to the RSPs.

A few RSPs will be trialling the server during this evening/morning. The new server update will begin rollout with all RSPs during Tuesday if no gotchas are found.

Changelog
Fixed the most common server crash. The story behind this one is fairly convoluted:

When a player begins the process of joining a server, the server will begin buffering some kinds of information in anticipation of the player completing the loading & joining phase. However, players sometimes get stuck in the loading screen. This makes the server buffer more and more info for that player. A side effect of this is a temporary resource leak in the game server. The leak is immediately restored if the server changes map, or the player completes loading, or the player shuts down the game client. However if a player manages to remain stuck for 30+ minutes in loading on a server with lots of activity and the server doesn’t end the round, then the server could run out of the particular resource – it would then crash.

The new server version will forcibly disconnect clients which are threatening to exhaust that particular resource. With this change in place, we do not know of anything that would make high-ticket servers less stable than normal-ticket servers.

Long banlists will not crash the server.

The banlist supports up to 10.000 entries now. This limit can be raised in the future.
The banList.list command has been modified to return at most 100 entries at a time (similar to how BC2 PC’s banList.list command works).
Any administrative tools will need to be updated to be able to see more than the first 100 entries.

Corrections to the banlist documentation.


Docs
The R18 documentation applies to R19 as well. It can be found here: http://static.cdn.ea.com/dice/u/f/bfbc2/tmp/BF3_PC_Server_R18_902705_Docs_ServerAdministrator.zip [static.cdn.ea.com]