[2019] MP game Dedicated Server: Server Log File Excerpt: Event just before a hard lockup of client machine forcing shutdown and reboot

Hey @Vahlok & @SilverJustice

Could you verify the integrity of the files just in case some file got corrupted? Does the Windows Event Reporting tool showing something unusual?
Could you also let us know if there is any mod installed and the system specs of your server? You can send us your client and server dxdiag files privately if you want, so we can spot something weird going on.

I don’t have enough elements to give a fair assessment, but to me it sounds like an hardware or operating system issue.

Before digging more in things that could be totally unrelated, could I suggest a number of things to check just so we can eliminate a culprit:

• Install some temperature monitoring software (that checks both the motherboard, cpu and gpu) and run some stress software, like what is used to test the overclocking stability of a machine (like some of the graphic benchmarks in loop mode), or these Prime number calculation programs. (You can see some examples on https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/stress-test-cpu-pc-guide,5461.html)
• If that passes, we know it’s probably not an overheating issue, the next potential culprit would be the memory: I suggested to get memtestx86+, install it on a bootable usb key or CD, and then let it run during all the night: That could be something as simple as a flaky memory stick that only triggers now and then, explaining why your system locks up.
• If we are still good, I would do a system check, to verify that you don’t have any corrupted system file on disk: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/929833/use-the-system-file-checker-tool-to-repair-missing-or-corrupted-system
• And obviously, what @Ignasis suggested (Steam integrity check for Conan)

(I assumed you already did the usual thing: Making sure Windows is up to date, scan for virus/malware, check the graphic card drivers, etc…)

Regarding the Server, I can see why a wonky server would cause your game client to crash or misbehave, but that should not make windows to freeze.

Sorry, I should have been more explicit: It’s the client information I’m caring about, since that’s the client system that freezes, not the server.

What are the chances of a network card going bad?

Actually, at work we had to install (good: Intel) network cards on most of our machines than used built in motherboard Ethernet because we were using so much network traffic with our distributed builds, client-server connection, steam downloads and uploads, etc… that it was starting to impact build times and sometimes even the ability of moving the mouse because of the high cpu usage.

But freezing the system completely for more than a couple seconds, no, I’ve not see that.

Maybe try to install “process explorer” (or something equivalent) and let it running on the side, so when you notice your machine starting to suffer, you can see which process is starting to eat at your cpu, memory or disk.

I’m not sure if you are running IE “out of the box”, but these days, running a web browser without ad-blockers or java script catchers is a sure way to end up running some nasty scripts in the background.

Myself, while trying to find some very old version of some unsupported middleware library, I ended up on a website that had been hijacked trying to serve webpages full of bitcoin mining scripts: Just for the fun I try to run one in a sandboxed environment, and the entire machine collapsed until I killed the web browser

Running with the Resource Monitor on the side could help find out if the stutter is caused by memory, cpu, network or disk usage: Keep it on the side of the screen so you can see the small graphs and see if they spike.

Common culprits have been things like anti-virus deciding to scan your files while you play.

Common applications eating your CPU and memory budget like a Cookie Monster, definitely.

I don’t use Adobe ARM, so I can’t comment on that, but it’s quite common to have services in the background doing very intrusive updates that kill the performance of even the strongest machine.

Hopefully your problems will be solved after that, but keep monitoring

EDIT: If you only use Adobe to read PDF files using Acrobat, you can use Sumatra PDF instead, i’ts very compact, very fast, and uses almost no disk space at all