Multithreaded

[Branti]

Hi.. how multithreaded work whit srcds now.. I run 3 TF2 servers.. but i have it now on each core. Is it better to spread it now to all core?

edit. i run a quad 4 core

[Stinkyfax]

it's close enough to be counted as useless (multi-threading)

[Mike]

If you are running one server on the quadcore it would help (someone confirm it or shoot me), but if you have say 4 servers each "multithreading" it would not help.

[Branti]

(11-24-2011, 05:06 AM)Mike Wrote:  If you are running one server on the quadcore it would help (someone confirm it or shoot me), but if you have say 4 servers each "multithreading" it would not help.

Tnx.. It was as I thought to.

[BehaartesEtwas]

that's all not entirely true :-)

srcds has multiple threads, in fact since the orangebox update it has a dedicated thread to handle incoming traffic. this is very important to happen fast, even while the server is busy with calculating a new world snapshot. therefore it is always useful to allow srcds to use at least 2 cores. this can also help, if you host as many (or even more) servers than you have cores, because the cpu load of srcds is kind of "spiked" (once per frame it does a lot of calculations for a short time but then sleeps until the next frame).

on the other hand: multithreading does not indeed help you, if you plan to host large servers on slow multi-core cpus. almost all cpu ultilisation happens within one thread. so srcds does not actually balance between cpus. if one core is too slow for a fluent game play, assigning more cores to the process will not really help (unless you are only very close to the limit).

[realchamp]

There's only one thread for logical computations - so a faster single core processor would in most cases beat a dual or quad core CPU.

As BehaartesEtwas said it's true that SRCDS has more than one thread, however the other thread - which makes it "two" threads - handles all the networking and doesn't really improve performance unless you're having massive amounts of players simultaneously.

[BehaartesEtwas]

(11-29-2011, 06:12 AM)realchamp Wrote:  As BehaartesEtwas said it's true that SRCDS has more than one thread, however the other thread - which makes it "two" threads - handles all the networking and doesn't really improve performance unless you're having massive amounts of players simultaneously.

but it's important that this network thread can run immediately when a new packet arrives, that's why valve put it into a dedicated thread and why 1000 fps are nonsense nowadays. of you tie srcds to a single cpu, the thread cannot run anymore while the server is calculating a tick. that is not ideal!

[realchamp]

(11-29-2011, 08:13 AM)BehaartesEtwas Wrote:  

(11-29-2011, 06:12 AM)realchamp Wrote:  As BehaartesEtwas said it's true that SRCDS has more than one thread, however the other thread - which makes it "two" threads - handles all the networking and doesn't really improve performance unless you're having massive amounts of players simultaneously.

but it's important that this network thread can run immediately when a new packet arrives, that's why valve put it into a dedicated thread and why 1000 fps are nonsense nowadays. of you tie srcds to a single cpu, the thread cannot run anymore while the server is calculating a tick. that is not ideal!

That's true.