The unknowns: dual cpu's hd's and IP's.

[kimball]

Hey, I have been working for sometime on making a game control panel on Red Hat 9. It is on a pretty simple "server" it only has 1 processor and a big HD as well as 1 ethernet device.

I was wondering what the differences were when you run a server that functions on 2 or more CPU's (processors) and more then 1 Hard Drive with more then 1 external IP address.

How is all that done? Is it usually detected by linux or do you need to do anything differently for, say, for srcds to get the benefit of having 2 cpu's. And how do you configure your network with assinging more then 1 ip to a single server. (I've read the tut on this site about that.) and also how is differnet using 2 hd's?

I am just wondering so I can get an idea of the differences and allow srcds (and hlds) to take full advantage if I had a server that had these things, rather then have them but not be used.

My big question though is how do you configure a server to take advantage of 2 Cpu processors?

[candy-man]

Most of the "configuration" is done by the operating system, not the SRCDS/HLDS config.

To answer your questions:

The easiest way to have multiple IPs on a single machine in Linux is to create "virtual interfaces" (sometimes called subinterfaces). With virtual interfaces, you can create several "virtual" network cards, which you can assign a unique IP to. Your typical network card would be labeled something like "eth0". A virtual interface would be something like "eth0:1". Another way would be to have several physical (real) network cards in the machine.

It's been said that SRCDS/HLDS can't take advantage of multiple CPUs. I'm not sure how true that is. If I watch "top" on my server, I can see the load switching between each CPU. I have nothing else running on my server, so it has to be the SRCDS process that's switching. Linux is doing it all for me. There was no configuration option in SRCDS for this to occur. I attached an image showing the spread.

Once again, multiple HDs isn't an issue with SRCDS and you don't need any SRCDS config options to take advantage of it. Linux is in charge of mounting the drives. You would simply have a second "mount point" for the new drive in addition to your first drive's mount point (by default "/"). I believe the Redhat mount points can be edited in "/etc/fstab".

[kimball]

Thanks, that reply is pretty comforting in terms of new things such as multiple cpu's.

Are you running 4 cpu's in that picture?

[candy-man]

I wish it was 4 real CPUs . It's a dual processor machine, but hyperthreading is enabled, so it creates two extra "logical" processors (one for each physical CPU).

[Hollanda]

Dual hd's can help your uptime go up. Use them in raid1 and if 1 failes the server will stay online.

For the cpu question: follow up candy man's answer. This goes up for windows servers also.

[kimball]

Did you do any tweaking to take advantage of hyperthreading?

And Hollanda what is that you mean by "goed"?

[Hollanda]

goes (typo)

In my opinion HT doesn't help running gameservers, only for webservers.

[kimball]

What do you think would work best

2 X 80 GB HD's

or

1 X 160 GB HD

[eXaXXion]

I would personally go with 1 x 160 SCSI 15K preferably seagate cheetah hard drive.

But like Hollanda said, if you want to be safe, go with 2 x 80 SCSI's and set raid

[candy-man]

If you're going to be starting a GSP, I would do 2x80 and put them in RAID1, as Hollanda suggested. That way your server shouldn't go down and you won't lose any information if one of the drives die.

[Hollanda]

Harddrive is not an issue with gameservers concerning speed. Sata wil do just fine. If you got enough to invest go for raptors or scsi in raid1.

[kimball]

I have heard that the average RAM is about 2GB for a gameserver do you feel that is accuarte?

Thanks for all the help you have given so far.

[Stealth]

Hollanda Wrote:Harddrive is not an issue with gameservers concerning speed. Sata wil do just fine. If you got enough to invest go for raptors or scsi in raid1.

i disagree! quake 3 engine loves to spike the cpu and HDD when changing map as it loads all of the pk3's and if you have dual processors you will likely be hosting more servers ... thus more hard drive reads!

Average RAM we tend to use is 1.5gb in "older" machines and 2gb minimum in the newer ones (xeon, amd 64bit etc) but for dual processors you would want to have more than 2gb to be safe or you will start paging

[eXaXXion]

Hollanda Wrote:Harddrive is not an issue with gameservers concerning speed. Sata wil do just fine. If you got enough to invest go for raptors or scsi in raid1.

I don't think you know the difference between SATA and SCSI and how they affect game servers and their performance. 7.5k, 10k, and 15k are the harddrive speeds and they are one of the most important factors you have to keep in mind when running/hosting high quality game servers. I don't know how many servers you are running/hosting, but I'm hosting more than 500 and I must have the fastest possible harddrives to meet my customers' demends: Lag Free Game Servers.

[kimball]

What are the fastest best performance harddrives?