50 man office server at sustained 66 tickrate?

[McMalakai]

Anyone run a 50-man office server at 66tic and is able to maintain a packet rate above 30/s for the first half minute of gameplay?

It appears just after spawn the tickrate drops to 15/s-20/s and you need a good 10-12 people to die before it goes back up to 33/s-40/s or so.

Anyone have thoughts on this? If you do run a 50man and maintain a consistent server-side tick, what sort of hardware setup are you running?

The CPU load does not appear to be the choke point. It's a 3GHz Xeon and the first virtual CPU is never above 60% utilization. I've tried binding the srcds process to a single virtual CPU but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.

I thought maybe it was a PCI bus or NIC card issue, but the outboud queue length for the Network interface is always 0.

Running the "stats" command non-stop shows that at times the FPS will drop from 512fps to around 102fps, and at odd times fall to 10fps, though i've only seen that number maybe 2 times in 100 stats command. During all of those stat commands, the CPU load is still never above 60%.

I guess I'm wondering if anyone's managed 50 man with consistent tic before i delve too deep into this.

thanks for your thoughts,
-McMalakai

[Drocona]

I think the FPS drops are your problem, the CPU should hold it easily as you said (60%).
Are you running srcdsfpsboost.exe or have windows media player open? If not, use one of those.

[McMalakai]

Drocona Wrote:I think the FPS drops are your problem, the CPU should hold it easily as you said (60%).
Are you running srcdsfpsboost.exe or have windows media player open? If not, use one of those.

Yes. I ran the standalone srcdsfpsboost.exe and lately switch to the SourceMM version.

Certainly, I wouldn't see 512FPS w/o a the change to the timer. I think w/o it you can't go above 64fps.

I'm wondering what other means are available to me to diagnosis this? Specficially, did Valve leave any means to profile the code while it runs?

Also, has anyone seen or built a plugin to log server stats to a file or DB? I'd love to plot the FPS, CPU load, and Bytes/In, Bytes,Out against round events (Round start, # of players, Recent actions like player death, player spawn, player buy).

If something like that doesn't exist it might be a neat plugin to write to get my hands went with SourceMM plugins.

[Hollanda]

At first: disable HT in your bios. Gameservers dont like hypertraiding.