What causes a server simulating at the wrong tick rate?

The server advances game logic once per rendered frame instead of on a fixed timestep, so an uncapped headless server runs the simulation far faster than the intended tick rate.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix a Server Simulating at the Wrong Tick Rate

Quick answer: Drive server simulation from a fixed timestep accumulator and cap the server's frame rate so it ticks gameplay at the exact rate clients expect.

A headless server with no vsync can spin thousands of frames per second, and if your logic ticks per frame, the whole game runs at warp speed. Pin the simulation to a fixed tick. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Use a fixed timestep accumulator

Accumulate real elapsed time and step the simulation in fixed increments (for example 1/30s) inside a while loop. This decouples gameplay speed from how fast the server's main loop spins.

2. Cap the server frame rate

Set a target frame rate on the headless server (Unity's Application.targetFrameRate, Unreal's net.MaxTickRate or a frame cap) so an idle server does not burn a core running at thousands of FPS.

3. Match the client's expected rate

Make the server tick rate match what clients assume for interpolation and prediction. A mismatch makes everything appear to move at the wrong speed even though no individual piece of logic looks wrong.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Ship the fix, watch the signature disappear from the next build. That's how you know it's really gone.