I crashed your server... (replace convoy route finding?) [11.34]

[DrSuperGood]

First off I suspect it is to do with route finding, I cannot be sure and this is only speculation but in any case it did crash the server.

Been trying to upgrade a long distance fishing line for a while now. This is from old sailing boats to more modern steam powered fishing boats that are faster and haul more. The replacement has been successful already for the other fishing lines. Just one line which runs far away from depots is giving problems.

Although the convoys have all been marked for replacing, they just never seem to be replaced (It says I must manually send them to depot). Having enough of this I decided I will send them to their home depot for replacement.

Thinking back I realise this was kind of a stupid thing to do. These are sailing ships and I want them to upgrade to steam ships so the sailing depot they came from will hardly help. I probably even deleted their home depot as part of a facility upgrade.

In any case issuing this replacement order at "home depot" resulted in the game hanging for >30 seconds (heavy processor load, possibly with huge memory allocation as it seemed to cause a lot of paging afterwards). After this time a lot of "cannot find a valid depot" errors appeared on screen (one for each convoy ordered to replace). During this time the server "crashed" so I was disconnected soon after the game resumed.

I assume it either triggered a watchdog into thinking the game crashed or the server did encounter a fatal error. In any case the client (x86-iaa) did not crash but did become unresponsive for an extended period. I can confirm the server did crash as some progress was lost.

The total number of ships ordered for replacement was 19. I had much bigger replacement orders before without this happening so I suspect it was to do with invalid or far away home depot. The freezing was limited to some extent (so it was not an infinite loop) and so it is likely related to some demanding process that has a finite trial scope before it "gives up" which is why I think it is the route finding.