Tips on improving performance

[allometry]

Greetings,

I've learned a few things about hosting SRCDS that I'd like to share with everyone. Hopefully, my tips can help them out too!

I'm currently running a gmod10 server with 6 slots on the following hardware:

AMD 3800+ x2
1GB Corsair XMS DDR400
WinXP Pro

6mb/768kb Bandwidth

When running this server, I use the following tools:

* srcdsfpsboost.exe
This helps like you wouldn't believe. Run it and you'll see improvements right away!

* Drocona's Guardian BAT file
This BAT acts as you server's wrapper, starting the server and restarting it when it crashes. Good to have on hand.

I've modified his BAT to include some other goodies. In particular, when starting SRCDS:

Code:

start /wait /high C:\SRCDS\server\srcds.exe -console -game garrysmod -tickrate 100 -maxplayers 6 +map gm_spacebuild_v2

Above, I've added a "/high", which sets the priority of the process within Windows. This improves the performance of your application, because you have told Windows it gets first dibs on resources. Do not set it any higher, or your server will become unstable.

* THG Task Assignment
This handy GUI application needs to stay running to always perform it's task, which is to set the processor affinity to what ever is defined. If you have a dual core processor, you can gain performance by setting the affinity for srcds.exe. The guide explains how this is done.

I have mine set to use cpu0, instead of both cpu0 and cpu1...

* server.cfg goodies
I've also added some lines to my cfg file to increase performance in-game. Here's what I've added:

Code:

sv_maxupdaterate 100
sv_minupdaterate 20
sv_maxrate 8000
sv_unlag 10
sv_maxunlag 10.0

If you read the documentation for any of these, you will see that they are targeted exactly for my server. Look around the forums for explanations of how these commands work, if you don't already know.

I hope this thread helps you gain more performance out of your dedicated server!

Cheers!

[smsmasters]

Thank you very much for this script. It works great!

[Drocona]

Thanks for the nice explanation and tips allometry!

Greetz,
Drocona

[smsmasters]

The only issue with this BAT script is that if srcds crashes with a "memory read error" or the like, you have to press OK to the dialogue window that appears before it can restart srcds.

Any ideas how to detect such a crash and allow it to restart srcds without having to press ok?

[Drocona]

disable windows error reporting and all should be fine. You can also use serverchecker or serverdoc.

[MaTtY]

you explained why you put /high. but why did you put /wait and start?

[Drocona]

/wait is there to stop the batch from executing the next command untill srcds.exe closes, that's the core part of the guardian cause as soon as srcds closes it starts it up again.