Networking Tick Health And Zone Pressure
Tick health is the feedback loop between runtime simulation, admission, service registration, and control-plane allocation. It lets a hot zone shed new players before the whole game server becomes unhealthy.
Purpose
Use this page when a zone is marked overloaded, allocation avoids an instance, or admission rejects with zone overloaded even though total server capacity looks available.
Zone Tick Measurement
The game server records tick health per zone: last tick id, last tick duration, last completion time, and overrun count. merge_tick_health_state creates aggregate snapshots while preserving the worst useful signal for service registration.
Overrun count is policy-driven. A single long tick may be acceptable; repeated over-budget ticks can mark a zone overloaded.
Aggregation And Registration Payload
Registration refresh copies aggregate tick health and per-zone records into the instance payload. It also builds zone allocation records with active players, max players, and ZoneAllocationPressure.
The control plane does not measure game ticks itself. It trusts the registered instance payload.
Zone Allocation Pressure
Pressure values communicate whether a zone is healthy, full, overloaded, or unavailable. Endpoint health can make a zone unavailable even when player counts are low. Capacity can make it full. Tick overruns can make it overloaded.
Admission and allocation both consume the same shared pressure vocabulary.
Admission Feedback And Load Shedding
When a zone is over budget, local admission rejects new sessions for that zone. Existing sessions continue running. This is intentional: it keeps hot zones from getting worse while preserving active players.
If admission rejects an unrelated zone, inspect whether zone ids are being recorded correctly in session counts and tick health metrics.
Control-Plane Allocation Sorting
The control plane filters and sorts game instances by latest placement incarnation, drain state, zone support, endpoint health, zone pressure, available zone capacity, and global capacity. Healthy endpoints and healthy zones win over degraded, full, overloaded, or unavailable placements.
Threshold Tuning
Treat tick-health thresholds as operational pressure valves. Setting them too low causes unnecessary rejects; setting them too high hides overloaded zones until players feel latency.
Tune thresholds with metrics, not anecdotes: compare overrun count, last tick duration, active sessions, visible entities, and AOI snapshot pressure.
Operational Checks
Check /metrics, the registered instance payload, control-plane allocation response, and game-server admission metrics. If the control plane still allocates to a hot zone, confirm the game server has refreshed registration after recording the overrun.