How to prevent players from Timing Out or crashing due to: Engine Errors, Lua Panics, Etc...

These issues are fairly common, a lot more common than the server itself crashing. The GMod client can crash due to a various number of reasons but thankfully we're able to document most of them to help you solve any issue you may have!

If you were unable to find a satisfying answer please feel free to ask us in our discord!

Common Disconnects

The list below is a documented list of unexpected player disconnects.

Disconnect: Dropped Player from server (Player timed out)

Since timeouts are generally only addon driven finding the cause is generally not too much of a hard task and just requires a bit of elbow grease!

You can follow some of the guidelines below to try and help you troubleshoot this issue:

Are your players timing out while they are joining the server?
Yes: Then the issue is more than likely due to the clientside lua taking too long to load, therefor crashing your players.
Solution: Review your addons, if this recently started happening rollback any changes you made, otherwise remove your addons and test one by one.

Are your players timing out while playing on the server?
Yes: This is likely caused by an addon crashing the player.
Solution: Ask players what they were doing before they crashed to identify the issue. If their answers are inconclusive remove your addons and test one by one.

There you have it, these are pretty much the only cases you'll see a time out occur, we hope this helps you!

Note: Time Outs in Garry's Mod are not related to Network Issues as if a player is disconnected via the network they would send the generic disconnect message or a different message.

Disconnect: Lua Panic! Something went horribly wrong! "not enough memory"

Lua Panics with the message "not enough memory" means the server is simply sending too much information to the clients' RAM.




If you see this rarely happening to a player or only a small few amount of players then it may simply be their client being too heavy before they join the server.

If you see this happening frequently to multiple players then you have an addon overflowing the player's memory limit, the best solution is to disable addons one by one until the issue ceases.
You can also ask players what they were doing before they encountered the issue to help identify the cause.

Disconnect: Player overflowed reliable buffer

This error is usually due to an addon causing a massive overflow into the reliable buffer.



If this recently started happening rollback any changes or new addons from the server
Otherwise you will need to disable your addons one by one to find the cause of the issue.

Updated on: 29/11/2023