How disk intense is SRCDS

[kradalby]

Hi

So i have a question.

I have to physical machines which i run multiple servers on each. both servers are pretty well speced with i7 and 16gb of ram.

but the bottle neck on both machine is the harddrive which is a standard one TB 7200rpm disk, in other words, one disk in each server with average speed.

So my question is, how disk intense is srcds. Does the bad drive performance affect the servers? or is it loaded once and then run in the memory with little or none drive usage?

I am talking only about gameplay and not about loading time between maps, or anything in that area?

The load on the server in terms of CPU is always under 30% on each core and the memory usage is around 2-3 gb and the rest is cached by the OS, which is Debian.

Kradalby.

[Terrorkarotte]

Depending on the amount of servers HL2 can be hdd intense. They improved it lately but still this can be an issue. Especially if you run multiple Plugins/Addons that are using SQLite and writing Logs.

Best practise is to run of loggin if possible to avoid HDD access.

Regards,
Terrorkarotte

[kradalby]

So switching to a SSD could acually give the server even a bigger performance advantage and i could run more servers than i do now? since i the load is low, but i haven dared to setup more because off some micro lagspikes. Could that be the harddrive?

[scso1502]

I host 10 servers on a dedicated server box. One of the best improvements I made was addressing the disk performance of the box. I'm a stat whore and love to know everything that's going on with my servers. I also have gameME stats which logs everything under the sun. This causes an enormous amount of disk I/O, especially if you have busy servers with a lot going on.

If you have a single disk devoted each server, disk I/O is not gonna be a problem at all. When you start hosting multiple servers on a system with a single disk and they're logging a ton of stuff, that's where stuff starts to bog down.

I'm currently running a dedicated dual Quad-core Xeon server box with 4 top-of-the-line 500 GB Western Digital Black Edition SATA drives configured with RAID 5. The I/O response of this setup is absolutely sick and really improved every aspect of the server's performance. I also use a little 3rd party Windows utility that allows me to see the disk activity in the tray icon area when I connect remotely to my server box using remote desktop. The thing is constantly showing activity because of the servers constant writes to the log files and tracking kills and what not.

Using an SSD is a fantastic idea and anything you can do to improve disk performance on your servers will be a huge benefit.

As for the lagspikes you're seeing, those typically equate to network issues so I doubt disk I/O is the problem.

I'm not sure how you're hosting your server (home, datacenter, wired/wireless etc), but the bottom line, SDDs are a good thing!

[kradalby]

We are hosting at home, so our next investment is actually a new computer for the routing part and a new switch which is way better than the last is actually been purchased.

But then i will invest in some ssds after this.

Thank your for a good and detailed insite !!

[Mike]

We use a Corsair 60 GB ssd in our machine, it works wonders. Reduced our interrupt count from 28K down to 11K per second. Improved some lag too actually, it's highly recommended. This machine hosts over 21 servers, so yeah.

[scso1502]

Don't get too crazy trying to optimize a home server for the Internet. If you're hosting at home, you have limited out-going Internet capabilities unless you're running a very unique home Internet connection with high upload speeds. Because of this, most home-based servers can't support more than 10-14 players anyway with lagging and 10-14 players will have almost no impact on a disk drive at all.

[kradalby]

I do have a 100/100 fiber connection at home, so there should not be any problems there

[scso1502]

Yikes! Studly! Let me guess Verizon FIOS???

[kradalby]

Fiber connectivity by altibox in Norway.