Operations4 min read
Scheduled tasks worth having on every server
Restarts, backups and the announcement that goes before them. Four schedules that prevent most of the incidents people report.
The Schedules tab runs commands and power actions on a cron expression. Most servers here run with none set, and most of the problems people report would have been prevented by four.
A nightly restart
Long-running game servers accumulate - entities, memory fragmentation, plugins that leak slowly. A restart at 05:00 costs nobody anything and resets all of it. This single schedule prevents more 'it gets slow after a few days' reports than any hardware change.
A backup before it
Take the backup at 04:45, not at 05:00. A backup taken while the server is shutting down is a backup of a server that is shutting down.
A warning before that
Send an in-game message ten minutes ahead. A restart nobody was told about is indistinguishable from a crash, and players report it as one.
Something specific to your game
- Rust - the wipe, on your cadence.
- Minecraft - save-all before the backup, so the write is on disk rather than in memory.
- Anything with a database - the dump, on its own schedule.