How to stable FPS? / Avoid FPS drops

[BehaartesEtwas]

the ultimate question is, if your server runs without any drop in a long time measurement over a month :-)
but this (more or less) not about the time interval of the measurement (5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 month, ...) but about the number of measurements. the fast measurement uses 300 measurements, the normal 720 (and thus is more precise!) and the long time measurement many more...
beware that 0 drops in a measurement don't mean your server doesn't drop. you can only say that it will drop in less then 1 of 300 (or 720 or what ever is your number of measurements) frames. so to know how your server runs really you need to make as much as possible measurements. easiest way is a long-time measurement, running a measurement longer than a week will also eliminate all daytime and day-of-week effects (from the server load)...

[Ronny]

My simple question is:

Is it possible to get an absolutly stable server or are fps drops sometimes normal?

btw, the fps drops are just starting when 5 or more players are on the server. with 0-4 its stable all the time.

[BehaartesEtwas]

drops are quite normal. really good servers show only one or two drops (if at all) during a normal fps-meter measurement. but also important is how deep those drops go. I think it is possible to run a server without drops below 100 fps (that's the 'magic' limit for a drop directly notable by the players). My war server runs like this:
http://www.fpsmeter.org/p,view;2;month;;beta.html

[Ronny]

http://www.fpsmeter.org/p,view;29784;week;;.html

so from the stability point of view this is nearly the best I can achieve?

[BehaartesEtwas]

If you use the new (beta) graph, you can see, that there are some drops below 66 (TF2 has a tickrate of 66, so that's the 'magic' limit here ;-)):
http://www.fpsmeter.org/p,view;29784;week;;beta.html

how many servers do you run on the root?
also you might want to try an "idler" (see my howto), that could help at least with the fps jumping between those two values near 1000... maybe even reduce some drops.

EDIT: This is a public server, isn't it? Then probably this is the best you can achieve. Map changes, player connects etc. might produce drops, you can't do anything about it.

[Ronny]

I stopped using the idler for testing purposes. With the idler and some chrt optimization the server will run at 990 FPS.

I'm currently running six TF2 servers on the machine. (5 clanservers and 1 public server). But I'm also noticing the FPS drops when only one server is running.

Btw, the public server runs with about 10 sourcemod plugins which may cause some FPS drops, too.

In general, I removed my idea about absoluty stable FPS so I'm happy like it is atm :-)

[BehaartesEtwas]

my public isn't better ^^
http://www.fpsmeter.org/p,view;1.html

[ccc]

(11-20-2009, 04:57 AM)css Wrote:  Your server specification matches Hetzner's pretty much, am I right? Where are you hosted?

I've got the same server (EQ4 at Hetzner, i7 920, 8 GB RAM, 2x750 GB HDD, best in Europe - mind me advertising) and I have solid 1000 fps (but there's on going debate about that ): http://www.fpsmeter.org/p,view;29521.html

I'm using the default Debian kernel (2.6.26-2-amd64 w/ 64 bit) without SourceTV. I don't use chrt or any of the other optimizations in fragaholic's wiki. I have the default kernel without any boosts other than fps_max 0.

Hello,

nice graph.

It's possible to use your kernel please?

If yes u can upload this?

Thank's

[BehaartesEtwas]

(11-20-2009, 04:57 AM)css Wrote:  I'm using the default Debian kernel (2.6.26-2-amd64 w/ 64 bit) without SourceTV. I don't use chrt or any of the other optimizations in fragaholic's wiki. I have the default kernel without any boosts other than fps_max 0.

so install the debain version that has this kernel :-)

[css]

It's Debian 5.0.1, but I doubt the version number matters at all.

[BehaartesEtwas]

nb: css's server isn't that good all the time. he ran serveral measurements until he "accidentally" got one without any drop. since x-mas he doesn't have a long time measurement running at his server anymore, so I can't tell you how it runs right now, but before it was really not that good... maybe he was just lucky? (or did you change something, css?)

[css]

Umm... I think I've got your tools measurement to link to. If that's not right then what is?

[BehaartesEtwas]

http://www.fpsmeter.org/p,view;28705.html
isn't that the same server?
I guess something at your server changed around 22.11.2009... unless you changed the kernel at that date it will mean that the kernel doesn't necessarily lead to that kind of server quality :-)

[css]

(01-09-2010, 07:36 PM)BehaartesEtwas Wrote:  I guess something at your server changed around 22.11.2009

I re-enabled SourceTV then.

[BehaartesEtwas]

(01-09-2010, 10:34 PM)css Wrote:  I re-enabled SourceTV then.

ah ok. but it wasn't running without drops even before :-)

btw: why do you have srctv running on a public? :-)