Preventing Crashes & Recovering Tourney After Crash

[derhussl]

So I had this happen yesterday and I am wondering a few things.

1. What can I do to keep Poker Maven from crashing? Is there anything on my end that helps like rebooting it, bringing it offline anything I need to do to help with that? Is a better server environment helpful in preventing crashes?

Right now I am on the same host as the demo site on a free account right now.

2. When a crash happens in the middle of a tournament which happened last nite is there a way to bring the tournament back up and all its data so it can continue or is a crash a tournament killer?


So I am trying to see if we can do anything to prevent crashes and if we do have somewhat can we do to restore back to right before the crash at least from a perspective like a running tourney?

In running for the last 6 weeks or so we have had 2 crashes so I am looking on how we can be more proactive in preventing that. Right now we tend to turn on the poker server and it just runs continuously without being turned off unless something that requires it needs updating.

Thanks for any help and advice in this. We are loving the software overall!

[Kent Briggs]

A crashed tournament cannot be restarted. When you restart the server it should find a crash file in the data folder which it will use to distribute the remaining prizepool evenly to the remaining players at the last saved point in the tournament.

How many players were logged in at the time? What were the symptoms of the crash? Were there errors recorded in the error log file? Do you have automatic updates turned off in Windows?

[derhussl]

A crashed tournament cannot be restarted. When you restart the server it should find a crash file in the data folder which it will use to distribute the remaining prizepool evenly to the remaining players at the last saved point in the tournament.

How many players were logged in at the time? What were the symptoms of the crash? Were there errors recorded in the error log file? Do you have automatic updates turned off in Windows?

I am not sure how many players we had on but I would guess likely 30 to 40. I dont know what the symptoms were unfortunately I just got a call that the tournament crashed.

I will check on that crash file in the data folder that is good to know that it exists.

I do not believe I have automatic updates turned off. I am guessing I need to do that so the server does not reboot to make the update take effect?

Where is the error log file?

[Kent Briggs]

I am not sure how many players we had on but I would guess likely 30 to 40. I dont know what the symptoms were unfortunately I just got a call that the tournament crashed.

You need to log into your Windows server and see what the state of the program is (is the interface frozen, is there a popup error, etc).

Where is the error log file?

System tab -> Help button -> Locate data folder -> Logs folder

[derhussl]

So both times the client was completely down. Not frozen or anything just completely off.

I will go look in the error log and see if I can see anything there.

I went to see if automatic windows updating is off and it was on automatic so I set it to download only.

Thanks for the help!

[Kent Briggs]

So both times the client was completely down. Not frozen or anything just completely off.

Then most likely your server rebooted from an automatic Windows update. Log into your server via RDC and get a command prompt:

Windows Start Button -> Run -> CMD
or
Windows Start Button -> Windows PowerShell

Type enter this command to get the last boot time:

systeminfo | find “Boot Time”

[derhussl]

Yeah that looks like what the problem was. I turned the automatica updates off so lets see if that solves this.
Thanks for all the help Kent.

[KanpaiGuy]

A crashed tournament cannot be restarted. When you restart the server it should find a crash file in the data folder which it will use to distribute the remaining prizepool evenly to the remaining players at the last saved point in the tournament.

How many players were logged in at the time? What were the symptoms of the crash? Were there errors recorded in the error log file? Do you have automatic updates turned off in Windows?

Would be great to add this capability to set custom chip counts for tournaments prior to start in a future release. This would allow admins to restart tournaments from their previous state by analyzing the HandHistory logs for that tournament. Hope to see this functionality at somepoint given that crashes are never completely avoidable. Especially now that windows 11 does not allow for updates to be permanently paused as far as I can tell.