When every monster respawn, every buff expiry, and the on-the-hour reward all land on the same tick, that one tick becomes tens of times heavier.
Why Respawn, expiry, reward, and autosave timers are all set to the same moment → Effect That one tick has tens of times its usual work → On screen A hitch at each of those scheduled times
Spread timer times out with a little randomness, split the work across several ticks.
On the graph
Periodic spikes · Server tick time
Where to look
The times ticks spiked, collected to check the intervals (on the hour, every 5 minutes, and so on), and cross-checked against the list of respawn, buff expiry, reward, and autosave timers that run at the same moment
Confirmed if
Ticks spike at the same times or intervals every time, and some game timer work fires all at once at those times
Ruled out if
Periodic, but lining up with pause times in the GC log or the server’s cron and backup times: points to “Server GC stop-the-world pause” or “Scheduled jobs”
Check with
Game server or client logs and metrics
Sources
Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitterAWS Amazon Builders’ Library. Add jitter to all timers, periodic jobs, and delayed work to spread out load that would otherwise land at the same moment; a case where one-minute requests from many servers piled into the first few seconds of every minute