uhh really confused.. My servers world file just got 6 times larger in a few hours

[Jeff Fisher]

First off I don't really mean my world folder specifically Im talking about the size of my whole backup of the server.

Im not sure whats going on but it cant be good..

My server was doing fine other then a few crashes here and there from ppl doing dumb things.


But just a few hours ago the server started lagging..

My memory on my client when I hit f3 is climbing and going back down and climbing then going back down really fast...


And I just did a backup of the world and looked at the size and holy crap.. I backed up my server this morning the file was its normal size of 600mb, the backup I just made now is 3,386mb !!! wth?

What could be going on here?

I am the only one on the server rite now so no one is out exploring and even if someone was to go from 600mb to 3,000mb in only a few hours!?

I'm really confused..

 

[Omicron]

My memory on my client when I hit f3 is climbing and going back down and climbing then going back down really fast...

That is normal behavior for the client and has nothing to do with your server at all. What you are seeing is java consuming memory to run, then doing a cleanup on unneeded old data, then consuming more memory, then doing another cleanup... it's just what it needs to do to keep running. A bit like a beating heart, if you will. Completely natural.

And I just did a backup of the world and looked at the size and holy crap.. I backed up my server this morning the file was its normal size of 600mb, the backup I just made now is 3,386mb !!! wth?

Is that the size of your entire backup? If so, could it be that you are looking at several backup states at once? I.e. five to six consecutive backups, each sized 500-600 MB?

You know, 600 MB is already pretty large for a world file on a server that you're the only one playing on... I once ran a server for five other people, and we played for a good 1.5 months, and the world size was in the neighbourhood of 70 MB (including a ton of terrain that was explored but never used). I know of only one thing that could generate that much data that fast, in all honesty, and that is Mystcraft.

Mystcraft used to be a huge problem when you could still discover new symbols by generating random ages. People wanted Dense Ores, Crystals and other high value symbols that only occured once every couple hundred books, and when you had 10 people doing this on a server, it was not uncommon to see 1000-2000 new dimensions spawned in the span of a day. Even if only the spawn area was generated and used just 1 or 2 MB, that would still utterly kill available harddisk drive space on the server. And not onyl that, but the spawn area of each visited world would also be kept loaded, meaning that memory and CPU load went through the roof as well. It wasn't for no reason that just about every responsible server owner made Mystcraft admin-only, if not banning it outright.

Nowadays the problem is slightly less pronounced, but it can still easily be a big issue. You no longer discover new pages by spawning ages, so you won't be seeing hundreds of dimensions loaded at once anymore. However, one of the most efficient methods of collecting symbols is still spawning one random age and then exploring it for forgotten libraries. In effect, that still blows disk space use to high heavens, and the constant terrain generation causes a lot of lag for the whole server.

TL;DR: Mystcraft kills servers. Put it on a leash.


Is this what is causing your problem? I don't know, I can only speculate. But I definitely don't know anything else that can cause so much disk space consumption in so short a time.

 

[MilConDoin]

Which files grew unproportionally big? Maybe the log-file? Was a big bunch of new files added?
Name the big changes, then the source of the problem has a chance of being identified.

 

[vScourge]

Does your server have Dynmap installed bychance? That can definitely render a couple GBs of map tiles in the span of hours.

 

[blaize9]

Are you making a backup of the backups? That is a common problem for new admins.