Battlefield 2 patch causes server chaos

EA released the first small patch for Battlefield 2 yesterday and while it helped on some irritating issues on the client side, it caused much greater problems on the server side. Server admins are reporting that the game now has huge memory leaks. The exact figures vary but some Windows servers are reported to lose 500 MB of memory after running a server for 2-3 hours meaning that they could be crashing fast. A standard BF2 dedicated server usually takes up 150 to 170 MB of RAM. Although we don’t have any exact figures, the Linux servers don’t seem to lose huge amounts of memory, but they are affected, too.

This means you’ll probably experience more frequent crashes than before the patch – no matter what provider you’re using. Alternatively providers have to restart their servers more often, which means that during the night you’ll probably not see all servers go back online. (Our own servers will not be restarted during the night if they crash at least, ed.).

So far only the server providers are reporting about this issue and it's causing lots of grief on the BF2 server admin mailing lists. EA has yet to make a statement.

UPDATE: EA will soon make a statement about this. Read this story for more.