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I know that the topic sounds oddly backwards but as we know a majority of srcds is run in RAM (which is why when you can change any server file while the server is running you need to reload the server or mapchange etc (basically re-paging the files from the HDD)) I guess what I'm aiming at here is will having lower latency in RAM as well as faster frequency will directly increase performance of my server. Now i guess for this to work the server will have to be 100% stock as addons are constantly being paged from the hard drive (atleast parts of mani and event scripts)
am i on to something here?
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No.
You're still IO bound when it comes to maps/logs/etc.
Put your maps on a memory disk, or write something to mmap() them.
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This is CPU clock speed, not ram speed. Most memory 'optimizations' ('faster') are so miniscule now that you cannot possibly notice.
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11-24-2011, 06:24 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-24-2011, 06:24 PM by BehaartesEtwas.)
it's always the question where the bottle neck is. if your cpu is very fast, the ram might slow down everything. if you upgrade your am, it might well be that your cpu again will be the slowest component. of course the situation will not always be the same, it will depend on what the server is doing in a specific moment. in the next moment, the situation might be different again.
generally what helps best against that is a large cpu cache. if it is large enough, the prefetching will completely eliminate any latencies from ram. of course you will never know whether the cache is large enough or not. but making ram faster is not so easy, the differences are very small only (as monk said). unless you upgrade to a new technology of course (ddr2->ddr3 etc.)...
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it takes ~200 cycles of cpu to get read a cell from RAM. reducing delay speeds up your whole pc, so getting fast ram is very important. Also if you run few gameservers for CPU it's fine - spreads the load between cores, but they all overload your single RAM. Importance of RAM frequency and delay can not be underestimated.
And it doesn't have to be 100% stock, for example SM plugins are in RAM. for hell, how stupid should a plugin be to read instructions from HDD during execution?
Best Regards,
Stinkyfax
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It's probably more quantity(to a certain amount) over quality when speaking about memory for SRCDS. There might be minor "unnoticeable" improvements, something a RAM disk with more memory could live up to.
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with quantity it's quite simple: either you have enough ram, then more ram will only speedup map changes. or you don't, then you will have immediately terrible lags due to swapping... it think the positive effects of more ram are even less ;-)
