SRCDS & RAID 5?

[SaintGTR]

I know that RAID 5 is a combo of performance and redundancy, my question is how would 3 x 1 TB hard drives in RAID 5 perform as far as srcds goes?

I got some eventscripts and sourcemod plugins so I am curious how plugins like RPG mod which have to record player stats will work.

[Spartanfrog]

I have never noticed any performance boost having faster hard drives, ex 7200 RPM to 10,000. Perhaps it would make a difference utilizing RAID 5 but I would not count on it. It would be awesome to try it and post the results but I would buy a setup banking on the fact you will get increased performance. Maybe maps would load a bit faster.

[SaintGTR]

Anyway to benchmark it? I don't really see a way to do it that would get good results.

[Mooga]

I've heard some people calming that faster HDDs can speed up map load times.
Truthfully, you really don't need RAID 5 on a game server... but it shouldn't hurt it.

[hankinator]

From my experience anything with a 7200+ is good. Unless your running more than 20+ servers. Also SATA>IDE is quite noticeable. What I have noticed with faster HDD's is that the server starts/restarts faster and from what everyone else said map changes are sped up.

[3choE]

(02-22-2010, 03:49 AM)SaintGTR Wrote:  I know that RAID 5 is a combo of performance and redundancy, my question is how would 3 x 1 TB hard drives in RAID 5 perform as far as srcds goes?

I got some eventscripts and sourcemod plugins so I am curious how plugins like RPG mod which have to record player stats will work.

Since I put together a dual CPU box and hosting 8+ 32-slot (TF2/CS:S/GMod) with it, and Windows 2008 R2 has implemented TRIM, I got my box a 30GB SSD, and I really like the result.

I am just hosting for fun, so I didn't bother to do any extensive performance test.

(It was troublesome for me doing the initial test. In order to get enough pub players, I set up a couple idling servers, a couple instant respawn servers, as well as sending out announcements to a few Steam groups for getting players...)

My other box from a hosting, I have 4x TF2 32-slot, and SATA 3.0Gb/s 7200RPM is fine, but I am not sure how it would perform with 8+ 32-slot.

With the SSD, during the game, myself & my friends didn't experience any stuttering. I didn't check with the pub players, as they might have a better or worse machines (one of my friends was having lag, yet it was the real-time scan of his anti-virus). Yet, since TF2 server caches most of the needed stuffs in memory, during the game it doesn't access the HDD much, I guess it wouldn't help the in-game performance.

The main benefit is when caching during the level change. Consider you are hosting 8+ 32-slot, and 4 of them are changing level.

---

Again, since HDD nowaday is pretty affordable, and setting it up for testing isn't hard, you really should try for yourself, instead of taking my words for it.

You can try something like hosting an instance of SRCDS, and do some video editing/file backup/file compression.

---

I personally don't think RAID 5 is necessary, since you are not hosting any critical data, like database, or hosting a commercial shopping site. For SRCDS, just a weekly backup of the configuration would be enough.

Then again, either way is fine, especially it isn't going to cost you much extra, nor hard to set it up.

[skeletor]

Server side, we have done some testing and with fast drives/raid arrays you will notice the server starts up a lot quicker, however outside of that the difference is really minimal. I suppose if you were running a lot of plugins that wrote files to the system during round changes or map changes then you may notice more of an improvement. We have deemed it to be not worth it. We run just quality 7200 drives in raid1 for redundancy.

Although if you are going to go for raid, I would add another drive and just do raid10 personally.

[BehaartesEtwas]

(02-25-2010, 07:42 AM)skeletor Wrote:  however outside of that the difference is really minimal.

= not present (hopefully, see below)

Quote:I suppose if you were running a lot of plugins that wrote files to the system

writing doesn't matter (unless it writes really huge amount of data), there is a write cache in linux and everything is written asynchronously to the disk.

uncached reading (i.e. files not written a short time earlier -> spray logos etc. be in the cache!) could be a problem, but it will be in any case: at 1000 fps the server has 1ms per frame. there is no way with any present hard drive to position the drive head to the right sector and read some data within that time. Positioning usually takes a couple of milliseconds. No RAID can change that.

so if the server would read files during normal operation (i.e. not cached files), you would have massive fps drops in any case. a RAID won't help against this, because positioning is not faster, only linear read is improved by RAIDs...

but of course, it will not hurt and can make sense e.g. for redundancy.