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Chrome crashing

Tuesday, 01 May 2012 20:00 Written by VladoPortos 0 Comments

Chrome Browser randomly Crashing

Hello all,

For some reason my chrome browser start randomly crashing ( within 4 min of running ).

What helped to me:

Find the folder where chrome stores its setting and move it, do not delete it ! you might wanna some files from it back like bookmarks and so on..

  • Windows XP: %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\
  • Windows Vista and Windows 7: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\

Close chrome and rename “User Data” to “User Data_bkp”.

Start chrome back and it should be nice and clean like day it was born.

Regards,
VladoPortos

 

Diablo 3 stuck on updating setup files

Friday, 20 April 2012 18:43 Written by VladoPortos 0 Comments

Seems like lots of people including me have problem with Diablo 3 beta client or even with full pre downloaded client and get stuck on updating setup files.

 

There is couple of solutions on the net but this one worked for me:

find C:\ProgramData and delete the Battle.net folder after that rerun the client.

I hope this work for you !

Regards,
VladoPortos

How to: Dead Island and Team Speak or Ventrilo ?

Sunday, 18 September 2011 19:19 Written by VladoPortos 0 Comments

Hello All,

So I got my hands on Dead Island game, it is buggy, boring for single player but fun as hell in duo with friend.

There is one issue than plagued us and that is absolute lack of control over voice in game, anyone who joins your game can shout all kind of shit there and you can’t mute, increase their volume or decrease… no control at all !

 

So you decided to use Team Speak or something like that, but how do you turn off the in game microphone ?

Step 1:

Get rid of the in game microphone: right click on the sound icon in windows ( near your clock ) and choose “Recording Devices”. As the Dead Island game takes the setting from here choose for example “Line-In” or some other device that you don’t have connected and make it default by clicking on “Set Default”. Doing this game will no longer listen on your mic.

Step 2:

In Team Speak setting set your mic to correct device, so when on Team Speak it works fine.

How to start it ?

  • first run the game, get completely in to it  until you can run around with your character
  • than alt+tab to switch to windows
  • start Ventrilo or Team Speak

I’m running the game like this and all works quite ok, there is one more thing..
sometimes game makes Team Speak volume very quite… alt+tab from game and right click on your sound icon and chose “Open volume mixer” there should be Team Speak volume bar, just rise it back up and alt+tab back to game…
Thats all folks,
enjoy the game !

Minecraft in ramdisk or how to speed up minecraft server. (bukkit)

Wednesday, 17 August 2011 05:25 Written by VladoPortos 0 Comments

Hello all,

In this tutorial we will look at how to put our minecraft server to ramdisk.

Ramdisk is basically a disk that live in your ram, so you will need a lot of ram for this. We will be putting only maps for our servers there so depends on size of your map how much ram you will need.

I’m also going to show this for Ubuntu linux ( probably works the same for other distributions also ).

Advantages:

Speeeeed ! Read and Write speed is much much higher than at normal disks lets see test here:

vladoportos /minecraft $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/shm/test.data bs=1k count=128k
131072+0 records in
131072+0 records out
134217728 bytes (134 MB) copied, 0.155647 s, 862 MB/s

Above you can see that it wrote 134MB with speed 862 MB/s (higher number is better)

and for normal disk:

vladoportos /minecraft $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/minecraft/test.data bs=1k count=128k
131072+0 records in
131072+0 records out
134217728 bytes (134 MB) copied, 0.298504 s, 450 MB/s

you can see that its almost half time slower ( this is 1+0 disk raid ) so putting your maps in ramdisk is very nice boost.

Disadvantages:

  • it is volatile memory, meaning that if server get restarted it will clean up
  • well an obvious reason, you will need a lots of memory

Very good tutorial is here: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Tutorials/Ramdisk_enabled_server

You can basically follow that one and copy maps as they show there to /dev/shm which is basically your ramdisk.

I have created folder /dev/shm/minecraft and put maps there and my normal maps and bukkit files are in /minecraft, this is important to know when you see my scripts.

My words are called “Svet_MineCraftu” + there is nether, skylands etc… depends on your plugins.

Here is how my soft links looks like in /minecraft ( on disk ) you can see I have used ln -s as in the tutorial above ( the link ) to create soft link that points for folders with maps in ramdisk (/dev/shm/minecraft…) and have same names ending with _perm which are permanent copy stored on disks of maps.. we will keep syncing this between ramdisk maps so when we have restart of server we don’t lose all our data.

Svet_MineCraftu -> /dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu/
Svet_MineCraftu_nether -> /dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_nether/
Svet_MineCraftu_nether_perm/
Svet_MineCraftu_nightmare -> /dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_nightmare/
Svet_MineCraftu_nightmare_perm/
Svet_MineCraftu_perm/
Svet_MineCraftu_skylands -> /dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_skylands/
Svet_MineCraftu_skylands_perm/

Scripts:

Syncing script that keep our ramdisk maps synced with _perm version on disks

rsync_script.sh

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#!/bin/sh

MAIN_DIR="/dev/shm/minecraft"

WORLD_VOLATILE_1="/dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu/"
WORLD_PERM_1="/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_perm/"

WORLD_VOLATILE_2="/dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_nether/"
WORLD_PERM_2="/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_nether_perm/"

WORLD_VOLATILE_3="/dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_nightmare/"
WORLD_PERM_3="/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_nightmare_perm/"

WORLD_VOLATILE_4="/dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_skylands/"
WORLD_PERM_4="/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_skylands_perm/"

#check if minecraft folder exist in ramdisk ( you don't wanna sync if it is not there )
if [ -d $MAIN_DIR ] && [ ! -e /minecraft/restore.lock ]; then
# Control will enter here if /dev/shm/minecraft exists
rsync -r -t -v "$WORLD_VOLATILE_1" "$WORLD_PERM_1"
rsync -r -t -v "$WORLD_VOLATILE_2" "$WORLD_PERM_2"
rsync -r -t -v "$WORLD_VOLATILE_3" "$WORLD_PERM_3"
rsync -r -t -v "$WORLD_VOLATILE_4" "$WORLD_PERM_4"
#test message when running from command line
# echo "Sync done... !"
else
echo "Minecraft DIR in ramdisk doesn't exist... ! or Lock is created"
fi

And one more script, this one will recreate the ramdisk after server reboot

ramdisk_recreate.sh

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#!/bin/sh

MAIN_DIR="/dev/shm/minecraft"

WORLD_VOLATILE_1="/dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu/"
WORLD_PERM_1="/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_perm/"

WORLD_VOLATILE_2="/dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_nether/"
WORLD_PERM_2="/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_nether_perm/"

WORLD_VOLATILE_3="/dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_nightmare/"
WORLD_PERM_3="/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_nightmare_perm/"

WORLD_VOLATILE_4="/dev/shm/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_skylands/"
WORLD_PERM_4="/minecraft/Svet_MineCraftu_skylands_perm/"

# Create LOCK file, while this file exist other script know restore is in progress
touch /minecraft/restore.lock

# here is check that will look if the directory dont exist, and if it doesnt it will create and sync it
# with permanent storage
if [ ! -d $MAIN_DIR ]; then
# Control will enter here if /dev/shm/minecraft doesn't exist
# first recreate directorys
echo "Recreating directories\n"
mkdir $MAIN_DIR
echo "Done... !\n"
echo "Restoring Maps... !\n"
# now sync
rsync -r -t -v "$WORLD_PERM_1" "$WORLD_VOLATILE_1"
rsync -r -t -v "$WORLD_PERM_2" "$WORLD_VOLATILE_2"
rsync -r -t -v "$WORLD_PERM_3" "$WORLD_VOLATILE_3"
rsync -r -t -v "$WORLD_PERM_4" "$WORLD_VOLATILE_4"
echo "Done... !\n"
echo "Removing LOCK file, syncng will continue as scheduled"
rm -f /minecraft/restore.lock
fi

And yes I know it could be done by “for” cycle but this way it is more clear for people who have no idea about bash scripts and can easy edit it… feel free to improve the scripts ( would be glad if you post me your modifications )

Don’t forget to use “/” in the end when defining your permanent and volatile map folders or rsync will create new folder inside the one you specified.

You will wont to call rsync_script.sh from cron every 5 min, you can risk 10min intervals but when you loose power and server reboot, depending when it happened, in worst case scenario you will loose 10 min from your map …

For 5 min I use this in my cron:

#Sync ramdisk with permanent map storage on HDD every 5 min
*/5 * * * * cd /minecraft && ./rsync_script.sh &>/dev/null

my script is located in /minecraft so it will cd there and execute it…

I hope this helped a little to all of you, leave a comment !

Regards,
VladoPortos

Minecraft client: out of memory error

Tuesday, 02 August 2011 09:59 Written by VladoPortos 2 Comments

If you are experiencing this kind of error on your client of minecraft, like client crashes with: out of memory error screen and you look stupidly on the 2GB free ram that you still have available than this is the solution for you.

Java applications start with default max allowed memory which is small… don’t ask me why, java is just stupid that way….

What you need to do is to add parameter to java so it will start with more memory. in linux you add -Xmx parameter with number of RAM you want it to use, but this is for servers mainly… for windows the solution is as follow:

Step 1.
Open CONTROL PANEL.

Step 2.
Type ‘Java’ inside the ‘Search Control Panel’ box.

Step 3.
Click the Java icon that pops up.

Step 4.
Click the Java tab.

Step 5.
Click View…

Step 6.
Assure there is only ONE line in here, any more lines could cause issues.
If you have multiple lines uninstall all versions of Java from your system and…
…download Java JDK 7 from the following link.
Make sure to get the x64 version if you have a 64-bit OS.

Step 7.
Change Runtime Parameters.
I have mine set to:
-Xincgc -Xmx2048M

***Change it depending on how much RAM you have.
For 32-bit Operating Systems 768M is recommended.
If you have 64-bit, or that doesn’t work, continue to try the following
1G
1536M
2G

This solved the issue for me, however it will not solve if the client have memory leak  which is common in java applications. It basically mean that application is creating chunks of memory that is not collected and scraped and stay in RAM unused, just using resource and in the end this adds up to memory full of garbage and app crash.

So my advice is to stay away from java ! sadly minecraft is good and fun game so no luck…

Regards,

VladoPortos 

 

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