In response to the apparent overheating problems when running Minecraft Overviewer, I installed software to monitor the CPU core temperature. I found that it was hovering around 40°C at idle. When I ran overviewer, that would climb to the low 90’s, but the system never shut down (which happens at around 127°C, I believe). So I enabled the nightly cron job to update the map, and all went well for a few days. Last night, the server shut down again.
I pulled the server off the rack today and found a significant amount of dirt. We’ve been doing some construction around here, and it would appear that things crudded up faster than usual (all the boxes get cleaned on a regular basis).
The inside wasn’t as dirty as the outside, but it wasn’t nearly as clean as I’d like. The CPU fan was spinning freely, which I didn’t expect, but I’m ordering a replacement anyway. When I pulled the heatsink off the CPU, however, there was no stickiness between the sink and the processor, so I’m assuming the thermal gel was deteriorated to the point of non-function.
After thoroughly cleaning everything, I applied new thermal gel and re-assembled. It’s now rendering a new map, and the CPU temp is down from the 90’s to a chill 48°C.
Once its stability is verified, I’m going to download the latest build of overviewer which should fix many of the missing or misbehaved blocks.
Update 16:16: The rendering is complete and the new Survival Server map is live.