Opterons not as useful as old 32bit Athlons?

[simonlange]

Well, the topic says it.

But let me begin in the past.

Once we had a Dual AthlonMP 2200+ with 1.5GB RAM (ECC Registered)
Linux Distribution was Fedora Core1
These processes did run on the machine:
hlds (40ports cs1.6) with clanmod, steambans, vac
srcds (40ports css) with maniadmin, steambans, vac
srcds (40ports css) with maniadmin, steambans, vac
srcds (12ports css) cvarblock, vac
hlds (12ports cs1.6) vac
...for the gamepart.
also these:
exim4
dbmail lmtp daemon
spamassassin
mysqld
spfd
lighttpd
proftpd
webmin
...and some selfmade daemons which did watch out for intrusion attemps and such.
Result: NO LAGS. Top Performance. No Problems so far. And even that although srcds or hlds DOES NOT participate of symetric processor architectures.

then we moved to another ISP (better peering) and a new hardware.
Now we using:
a single processor Opteron148 with 2GB RAM.
Distribution is Fedora Core 3
We have running these processes:
srcds (20 ports css) maniadmin, steambans, vac
srcds (12 ports css) cvarblock, vac
srcds (12 ports css) cvarblock, vac
...for the gamepart.
also these:
proftpd

but now we HAVE lags. terrible long lags. and we cannot find out why.
when a lag accurs we have these information:
400mb used of physical ram (2gb existing)
0mb of 1024mb swap used
cpu usually under 10%
at lagtime srcds consumes 100% no matter how many ppl are on the server, what map or what rates the users are using.
while lag, the icmp ping is stable and we can eliminate the existance of dos attacks.

all warservers (old and new hardware) did run on tickrate 100.

we think that valve has some serious problems with 64bit system since its the only thing we did change. smp systems are not used by valve. valve only consumes cputime of the first cpu in a smp system.

any ideas are welcome.

best regards

Simon

[Drocona]

There are some more posts about this, I have no idea where this is coming from, most people are clueless here too :S

[simonlange]

Drocona Wrote:There are some more posts about this, I have no idea where this is coming from, most people are clueless here too :S

well last time i tried to search for "opteron" or "64bit" all i get from this forum was a blank white page. i looked manually for some interesting sounding topics but could not find any...

i know that valve does not support 64bit on serverside and that 64bit servers are even a disadvantage against 32bit machines for valve products. but i thought that maybe someone has a good workaround to get out the maximum performance out of a 64bit machine for valve products or at least have an idea how to wipe out these valve/64bit related bugs...

best regards

Simon

[Drocona]

Yeh the search function is broken..

here it is:
http://forums.srcds.com/showthread.php?tid=2778

It's on windows but also with the AMD read through it, might get you some more information, maybe not lol

[simonlange]

not really, they did not even had the same symptoms as it seems... the most space wasting posts are internal flamewars who are offtopic and dont help anyone.

the hlds_linux mailinglist entlists several comparing issues on 64bit system. i guess valve has to do its homework...

[Hollanda]

Hi Simon,

At first I doubt you ran all those slots on only a dual Athlon MP. All full for sure they'll lag, especially with the other services running. I'm not saying you cant host it on that machine, but it's not ideal.

Second: You can not campare a single vs a dual cpu system.

The whole vs is wrong in you SP, different servers, different hardware, different OS, different uplinks.

So basically you are trying to get good performance on you new setup. scrds is taking up 100% cpu. Did you allready try to remove all server mods and then just run "clean" servers (preferably full)?

Also I'm just assuming you run the os on 32 bit? If not do so. srcds won't run that smooth on 64 bit systems + no VAC2 support.

[simonlange]

Hollanda Wrote:Hi Simon,

At first I doubt you ran all those slots on only a dual Athlon MP. All full for sure they'll lag, especially with the other services running. I'm not saying you cant host it on that machine, but it's not ideal.

well, they WERE filled up to 24/7 and there were no lags at all.

Hollanda Wrote:Second: You can not campare a single vs a dual cpu system.

signed. but since srcsds and hlds are NOT multithreaded and do not support smp architectures they usually run only on the first cpu. The SMP system was a benefit for all those background tasks... however. the "old" system had no problems. the problems are at the "new" system.

Hollanda Wrote:The whole vs is wrong in you SP, different servers, different hardware, different OS, different uplinks.

well, usually the differenes are not that big. in fact - the new system has more ram, the same bandwidth, same kernelversions (except not for opteron and old was for MP), same gameserver configuration.

the only thing i did was reducing the amount of servers and eliminating the NEED for all those background tasks.

Hollanda Wrote:So basically you are trying to get good performance on you new setup. scrds is taking up 100% cpu. Did you allready try to remove all server mods and then just run "clean" servers (preferably full)?

well, even a filled warserver with 12 slots does cause this. as far as i can see it has nothing to do with slots or plugins.

Hollanda Wrote:Also I'm just assuming you run the os on 32 bit? If not do so. srcds won't run that smooth on 64 bit systems + no VAC2 support.

i know, i tried both: 64bit and 32bit... no change so far.

the cpu consumption accurs sporadic - no matter how many ppl are on the server, no matter what/if plugins are loaded, no matter what kind of ppl try to connect, ...

the major CHANGE from the old to the new system is the upgrade of 32bit processor to 64bit technology. since srcds does not benefit from smp (it uses only first cpu - no multithreading,...) usually i should be able to even use at least the half amount of slots as on the old system. fact is that the new system and srcds do not even get the half.

some thing i did find out meanwhile by testing several configuration adjustments:
64bit dont like the pingboost option. i could recreate lags by setting pingboost to a value higher than 0. thats why i did switch it completely off. now i have lags max every 15minutes. with pingboost sometimes every 5minutes. usually the hardware has enough ressources.

i tried to change hardware but the hoster only serves opterons meanwhile. if i could change back to a athlonMP or a dual xeon machine - i would do this.

best regards

Simon

[Hollanda]

Opteron is not your problem, as long as you are running on 32 bit there is no 64 bit usage. The cpu is just build so it can also run on 64 bit.

Find you problem in 1 of the things I Previous mentioned:

Hollanda Wrote:The whole vs is wrong in you SP, different servers, different hardware, different OS, different uplinks.

Also don't try to campare the AthlonMP vs the Opteron, the Dual MP setup is just a bit more powerfull. Also dual cpu setups provite because they can spread cpu spikes so 2 x 100% cpu usage won't happen as often as with a single cpu setup.

Still I doubt you running all those slots on a dual AthlonMP, 40 slots css on tickrate 100 is practically impossible.

[simonlange]

Hollanda Wrote:Opteron is not your problem, as long as you are running on 32 bit there is no 64 bit usage. The cpu is just build so it can also run on 64 bit.

well, from my point of view a opteron is not able to host 44 slots of css.
why do you ignore the technical sidenotes i give you? how do you explain lags with load under 0.5, cpu consumption under 10% and memory consumption average 25%?!

Hollanda Wrote:Find you problem in 1 of the things I Previous mentioned:

Hollanda Wrote:The whole vs is wrong in you SP, different servers, different hardware, different OS, different uplinks.

well you did oversee the proportional changes. i never tried to run the same amount of processes as on the dual. an opteron 148 should be able to run 44 slots of css without sudden lags which noone can explain.

Hollanda Wrote:Also don't try to campare the AthlonMP vs the Opteron, the Dual MP setup is just a bit more powerfull. Also dual cpu setups provite because they can spread cpu spikes so 2 x 100% cpu usage won't happen as often as with a single cpu setup.

ack, but i never had spikes on the dual system.

Hollanda Wrote:Still I doubt you running all those slots on a dual AthlonMP, 40 slots css on tickrate 100 is practically impossible.

ah now i see. i had a mistype in the end of the post. the public servers ran with 33 on the old server.
however, no lags nothing no problems at all.

now i TRY to run 20slots on tickrate 33 (first tried 66) and 100 on the warservers. but at some sudden point the already mentioned lags accur.

so what does cause these sudden cpu consumption?
it happens no matter how many slots a server is running (tried 12 20 40)
it happens no matter if a server is filled or not (with 4 players and happens with 40)
it happens no matter what map is running (de_dust, de_dust3)
it happens no matter if plugins are loaded or not (maniadmin, steambans, zblock)
it happens no matter what tickrate is running (33,66,100)
it happens no matter if pingboost is used or not (switching off, does minimize the lags, but the lag is still there)

as already said: the cpuconsumption (even filled) ist never over 20% usually under 10%. the memory consumption is from 390 to 500mb (2gb physical memory available). the line is 100mbit FD.
i tried packet analyzer to see if there is maybe some kind of attack - no attack.

best regards

Simon

[Soynuts]

One thing to note is that even though you are using a 64 bit cpu, you are still running a 32bit OS. If you weren't srcds wouldn't even execute. Also, I noticed that the versions of FC are different between the two systems, one is FC1 and the new one is FC3. Both are 32bit OSes (only FC4 and FC5 come in 64bit flavors), however, FC1 does not have SELinux on by default while FC3 does. I'm not too familiar with SELinux so I couldn't say if that was part of the problem or not, but worth looking into.

I'm just curious, but what kind of fps are you seeing server side when you do rcon stats?

[Hollanda]

Hi Simon,

I'm not a linux expert, but the hardware is not your problem. Server should run 44 slots fine (full).

Find it in the software part. FC1 & 2 should be different. Also good question from Soynuts: server fps is what?

[flashstar]

Even though srcds is not multithreaded, many operating systems by default can run 1 instance on 1 cpu and another on the second cpu. It's just that the os is not able to split a single application between the two cpus.