Lag/Interpolation spikes for everyone on a TF2 server

[dualcore1289]

No problem.

[Queue]

I recently have been having the same problem. I am using NFO's VDS, with the cheapest plan and running a 24 man TF2 server. I started off with Gentoo and the server would run fine until around 10 people, then the random interpolation blips started up. Within a few minutes it was just unplayable.

After discussing options and trying a bunch of optimizations with the staff (helpful bunch), we tried switching me to Windows 2003 instead, until better Linux drivers or solution came up.

After switching I haven't had a chance to do extensive stress testing but it was handling 5 players for more than an hour without ANY lag blips. And from what this sounds like you have the same kind of spikes I had - it's nice to actually get to finish a map in my server.

I don't think this helps your current problem any more than mine was helped but see if you can switch to windows (if you're not?) it is true you can't really skimp on your server provider :/

[mumbles]

I haven't noticed this on my servers, but I have noticed it on some other servers in the last couple weeks. The latest update shut down some exploits and probably created a DoS vulnerability. A VDS/VPS is not the best choice for a large game server. It works, but they usually have limited bandwidth and they share processing power and hard drives with other VDS/VPS. If the lag spikes consistently happen, but only when the server has >10 players on it then it is probably a limit in bandwidth or processing power. One way to test this is to run top with an update delay of 1 second in an ssh terminal and see what the cpu usage is when there are 10 players. If it is at all close to 80% then you have reached the reliable limit of the hardware your running on.

[loopyman]

Yea, Lowpings = Counter-Strike.com = GameData Inc = Crap, granted they are better than gameservers by far, but meh. Look on this website and see what people say about other companies, be careful there is a lot of little companies which are owned by a kid and funded by their weekly allowance...