Shadowsong

You can indeed utilize multiple PC's to setup a cluster, as a real basic starting point i'd consider the following: Allow up up to 5GB of memory per grid (assuming you have no more than 6 islands) Allow 1 Physical CPU core per grid minimum. This can potentially be streched if you have newer processors and drop the server tick rate. As for the server setup, you would install ATLAS on each physical box and then choose one to run the Redis DB and point the others too it. Plan your ports, e.g - Game: 11000 Query: 12000 Seemless: 13000 RCON: 14000 then increase each number by 5 as you work your way though your servers. As a real world example, I run a 5x5 on a new 16 core CPU with 128GB of memory. At idle CPU usage is around 30-40% and memory around 98GB. These figures do increase as players jump on so you need to allow for extra headroom. As for hosting a 15x15 on a single grid - It would be possible, but you would need some considerable hardware. Something like a quad socket server housing the soon to be released 64 core AMD EPYC chips and over 1TB of memory. So nothing viable

Nope unfortunately not, only option as far as i know is to go through manually and check the islands off against the resources sheet.

That is a little strange, players should only be spawning on your freeports. How are the other islands setup? I believe you can allow spawning on them but players would be at a random location and not the freeport like on the other islands (because there isn't any). I'd check over those other island settings and make sure they are setup correctly and don't have the freeport/region assignments tied to them.

Center Maw on my cluster uses 800MB when empty, i have it setup exactly the same as official. So no islands, just the boss spawn.

I've never had any issues with Redis myself on a busy 4x3 grid running Windows Server 2019, I barely notice the memory usage. (21.7MB currently) but i don't use the bundled Redis edition which maybe why. I just use this - https://github.com/MicrosoftArchive/redis/releases install it as a service and configure it as required. (Using the pre-release version) As mentioned above it's a much cleaner way to run the servers, it's always on when running as a service and from my experiense is extremely light on resources.

What happens when you set a generic server name like "Testing123", if it launches with that then it must not be liking a character in your server name. Also not that it should generate that error, but make sure your unique ID is random so that it doesn't conflict with an existing cluster.

This is what i'd try first as well - I haven't ran multiple clusters from the same DB myself, but i do use the standalone redis install from MS (as a service) which works extremely well.

How are your backups working, are you using volume shadow copy or direct file backup? If it's the latter then i'd guess the lag is the delay in which it locks the file while it's backing up. With either option it's also worth checking your disk utilisation during the backup, quite often it can be as simple as maxing out the I/O which will cause a delay. If your backup software can be limited in I/O that would be best, but also lowering the backup process to a lower CPU priority can also help. (below normal)

Not possible as far as i'm aware, got to be set per grid.

+1 I think this would be especially useful for those people who can't play for periods of time. We use the equivalent mechanic for our communities Ark servers to reduce food/element consumption.

Been trying this as well but no luck, tried all the different BP's etc.

Same here, not found any other way. Bit of a nightmare really!

Yea if you've stuff there it does make it more difficult. i don't think there is anyway to tell for sure until you actually do it, most things are stored in the redis DB however it's not quite as straight forward as that from what i saw. I had an issue where one grid stopped saving, (some lock or something) when i unknowingly rebooted it, it reverted back to the last saved version and rolled back the server. In a few cases, Redis had a players in their own grids where they were playing, but duplicates of their character (asleep) in this grid as they had been passing through at the time of that save. So while redis may well hold the locations and data, the actual assets are still within the map file itself from what i can tell. I can't be certain but i'm pretty sure when testing previously i had wiped my redis DB numerous times which prompted me to make a new character, but previously created structures were still there. Going to be a bit of a pain in any case, but i'd still go for a map file wipe as a next step.

Exactly that, works fine on my grids. One company has successfully got the Kraken to spawn.

I imagine you will be fine if you stick with that logic of 2 cores/10GB per grid. You can always reduce the server tick should the need arise, i currently run mine at 20 but you can go down to 15 (like official) if needed. That drops CPU usage a fair bit which is useful for high population.