I've been making a large-scale mission with the intention of it being a near-perpetual battle, with both sides on a dynamic reinforcement pool.
I've hit a snag though, it's taken a while to confirm it, but after a number of hours (two or three) both sides OPCOMs stop assigning objectives. With Virtual AI debug on I can no longer see movement crosses after this time, and all forces sit stationary.
I've tried all permutations of force sizes and balancing, but the problem seems to be that after a while OPCOM just gets bored and goes home.
Any ideas? Is this a setup issue? A bug?

I've tried both of those already, even with small numbers it's the same, and the server reports only 15% CPU usage at peak.

I second the original post. There appears to be a bug in ALIVE that makes it stop working after a few hours.

I've done extensive testing with just ALIVE/CBA and I have never been able to get OPCOM to really work for more than a few hours. After a few hours OPCOM stops assigning objectives, units stop respawning and it then also stops sending units to objects. If I run some fancy scripts to look at the OPCOM information, I can see that objectives are assigned, I can see that groups are assigned to objectives, but no units are moved regardless. It's like OPCOM is frozen completely.

The simplest test that I couldn't even get to work is (using a bare minimum amount of modules with as much as possible default settings):

1. Give each side 1 custom objective in which they can respawn. Give like 50 units to each side.
2. Create an empty custom objective somewhere in between those 2 zones that is assigned to both sides, so that they will fight over that objective.
3. Make sure the player is not nearby and let the mission run for a while.
4. OPCOM reliably breaks after 2 to 4 hours. I know this because when this bug happens, AI units stop moving around the map, they also stop respawning, and the objective status is not updated properly anymore. What I mean with the latter is that the objective in the center might be assigned to BLUFOR, OPCOM says a BLUFOR unit is standing inside the objective, but if I look at the unit in question, the unit is actually not in the objective but kilometers away, in a completely different location, and is not moving.

Seeing as how even such a small, simple mission doesn't work, I think it's pretty clear that it's not the server performance that is causing the bug.

I have been able to get OPCOM to work longer by making it so OPFOR and BLUFOR AI never fight each other. So, what I mean is:

1. Give BLUFOR AI a single objective that is not assigned to OPFOR.
2. Vice versa for OPFOR, but give OPFOR some more objectives that the players will be able to fight over.
3. Let the mission run for 12 hours. No fighting happens during that time.
4. Afterwards, let players attack some objectives. The OPFOR AI then tries to reinforce and take back the objectives, killed AI units also respawn. This means that OPCOM still works at that point.
5. But after a few hours of actual fighting (players VS AI), OPCOM again breaks. The objectives stop being updated properly, no units are moved around and AI stops respawning.

I also tried to create a mission in which AI units don't respawn, so all units are spawned by ALIVE on mission start, but that changes nothing.

I did all testing on a dedicated server.

So, it seems that ALIVE works for as long as there's no combat happening. If there is combat happening, it seems to break after a few hours.

I don't have a test mission for you because last time I did any tests was about 2 months ago, which is when I gave up on ALIVE. But it's not like it's hard to reproduce this bug, seeing as how it always breaks after a few hours.

@SavageCDN ^ yes and considering the number of groups that use ALiVE in their persistent missions I would think this issue would have been reported in the past. I've had a mission running for 6 days before...although that was some time ago (around alive version 0.7). Will attempt to repro...

Well, generally speaking, I know from experience that only a small percentage of your playerbase will actually bother to report issues. Most people either simply try to ignore the problems, work around it, or abandon your product entirely and move on to something else.

Here's a recent example. In multiplayer, smoke is not working for the AI (more specifically, AI local to the dedicated server), they can see through it like it's not there. The issue was there for many months and still is (it's been there for at least 6 months, if not longer). Finally I got off my lazy arse and I reported it on the bug tracker and it seemed like I was the first (now, BIS has acknowledged it and is working on it). Yet, the bug report has gotten very few upvotes and nobody else is reporting this issue. How is that possible? It's an issue that affects almost everybody who plays against AI on a dedicated server and this issue has been there for a very long time. It affects all the big coop communities. Surely, somebody must have noticed it before I reported it. Yet, nobody bothers to report it. Such is life... In my case, it was because of laziness that I didn't report the issue sooner. Maybe everybody is lazy? ;)

Yes, that should be the repro. They both use a mil logistics module.

I noticed the bug first with regular zones. I used custom objectives later on because it's easier for testing.

I'll also try to repro it again and tell you how it goes.

Let it run longer. I've had it once break at 1 and a half hours and once after 14 hours. I'd say, let it run for a day, then you'll be pretty sure.

I ran the mission 3 times, respawn broke fairly quickly each time (after about an hour or two). So, the units stopped spawning and it never reached the point where more things break.

I'll add more empty objectives to both sides and give them some more units. Maybe that will keep the mission going.

So, I tried a bigger mission a few times, but everytime units stop respawning about an hour in. The remaining units are used to defend the areas they own, and so the mission comes to a halt - nothing happens.

The missions I've tried so far were either all civ objectives or all custom objectives.

Sure. Can I also have your test mission so that I can confirm it works?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s30xgkgfy5ql5th/MPMissions.rar?dl=0

From my experience, it happens for certain on bigger missions, it's just a matter of time.

Do you maybe have an ETA when it will be fixed? Weeks, months?