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Brian Jordan avatar image
Brian Jordan asked

Pre-warming Game Server Executable Instances?

Is there any way to pre-warm a certain number of game server executables, so players never need to wait for the game server executable to start up / load before jumping in to a match?

In other words, wondering if there might be something like "min free slots", but for "min # running game executables per region for this game mode".

& can see why something like this would not be optimal, e.g. cleaner to have short-living executable instances, getting server exe start-up time down would be ideal, & there'd be an explosion of minimal instances if you have lots of game modes & regions. But in our case this could be a good stop-gap until we can get server executable startup time way down.

I suppose something like this could be alternatively managed via CloudScript?

Custom Game ServersMatchmaking
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brendan avatar image
brendan answered

Well, the min free slots setting is specifically there to tell us how many server host machines need to be running, with your executable copied into it and ready to go. Ideally, your dedicated server should have a thread listening for connection requests from when you first start it, to minimize the amount of time between the start command and when you can have a client connect - for most titles, the simple latency of the Matchmake response is more than enough to ensure this isn't an issue. If you're having trouble getting the startup time down, I'd recommend using a retry on the client connection for now. Feel free to submit a Feature Request for an option to start a session running on start of a new server host, though. Letting other developers "like" that can help with prioritization.

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