FPS drop after 35th player

[Jonnybeats]

Hi, i'm one of the owners of a garrysmod RP server, BiasedGaming. We are in the top 20 of all gmod servers but we've had a few problems with source Dedi. After the 35th player has joined, the server fps gets capped at 12 fps and stays there from then on. Our server is a Intel Xeon X3440 with 4 GB of RAM running windows server 2008.

Any help is appreciated.

[Beaverbeliever]

What is the CPU usage of the srcds.exe when it is at the break point? It is likely that it is either maxing out on core CPU or RAM.

[Jonnybeats]

at break point the cpu is at about 20%

[Beaverbeliever]

If it is a quad core, that would mean its taking up almost a whole core. You might consider lowering the prop spawn count, and lowering other rates on the server to keep the server performing decently.

[loopyman]

With very large game servers like this it becomes crucial that you run a speedy processor.
More cores are great for running multiple game servers, but when it comes to processing large game servers quickly you're going to need some power.

However, It's interesting that your game server becomes sluggish right at 35 users... What is the max player count, and is there any console spam when you hit that number?

[Monk]

Interesting indeed. Never seen that behavior before, at least, on the older engine(s)

[Jonnybeats]

I believe it should use all cores, when we get up 40-50 players or so the cpu goes over 25%, i just don't understand why it's specifically the 35th player, props and other things don't affect it in the grand scheme of things but the fps drop is definately caused by the 35th player.

@loopyman the maximum player limit is 70 and the console, serverside and clientside acts as normal but the fps count just drops.

[Beaverbeliever]

The maximum player count for Garry's Mod is 128. They raised this for GMOD Tower team to get popular.

You can assign a game server to use multiple cores, but I don't think its recommended for performance, just for space.

[Jonnybeats]

Sorry, yeh our servers max players is 70.

I don't think its a problem with the cpu's performance, we've done some tests and tried a few things out. We've just narrowed it down to being srcds.

[loopyman]

I see... Have you experienced this on all garrysmod srcds game servers or this just one?

Also, does this affect the game play and make it unplayable etc? It could potentially be part of the engine to assist in large player counts, not sure just thinking out loud here.

[Jonnybeats]

I havent experienced this specific problem on another server, that just might be me not paying attention :L

It dosen't make it unplayable, just a bit laggy but i see your point, could be the case.

[loopyman]

Well, really if it affected other game servers at the exact same player count then I could understand it. This is just one of those odd things. Only other thing I could think of would be the mod or the addon or something. Possibly just hits a point where it has to slow it self down to keep up with the quantity.