TF2 system requirements > CS:S?

[fwaggle]

hi there,

i have a server on my home machine that runs great, but bandwidth is always a problem. i decided to try setting one up on my webserver, running freebsd 6.3. unfortunately it's a celeron, but i thought i might be able to at least get a small server to run on it and it'd work okay.

after much tweaking, i can have a 10 slot 33 tick CS:S server running on it without bots (with any bots at all, it all seems to go to hell) and everything goes pretty smooth for the most part. the occasional slowdown at the start of a round doesn't seem to bother us.

when i try to run a tf2 dedicated server however, at 3 people i start to experience very very bad slowdown. srcds's process on cs:s runs as srcds_i686, whereas on tf2 it runs as srcds_i486 - am i doing something wrong there?

as far as i know i've made all the same tweaks and i just can't get it any higher than that. i'd be content with 8 slots or so, two just isn't worth bothering though.

any suggestions other than "ditch the celeron" (i fully intend to later, but if cpu is the unsolvable problem i'll just run one from my home box and put up with limited bandwidth for now) and uneducated suggestions to modify my kernel would be greatly appreciated.

[Soynuts]

The requirements are much higher. To give some perspective. Running my 24 man TF2 server (TF2 is forced to 66 tick btw), is comparable to having my 20 man CSS 100tick server full. It's been a while since I've looked at cpu consumption, but for my 2.4ghz opteron (I have 2 dual cores), my TF2 server takes about 70-80% of one core at full load. It also uses about ~3mbps if I am reading my graphs correctly.

[css]

fwaggle Wrote:unfortunately it's a celeron, but i thought i might be able to at least get a small server to run on it and it'd work okay.

What version are we talking here? Pre-historic, old or new Celeron?

fwaggle Wrote:when i try to run a tf2 dedicated server however, at 3 people i start to experience very very bad slowdown. srcds's process on cs:s runs as srcds_i686, whereas on tf2 it runs as srcds_i486 - am i doing something wrong there?

It was said (by Valve employee) on the Valve mailing list recently that the i486 version is "highly optimized", so there's no need for separate version.

There's also neat patch to the srcds_run startup script. It sets the binary to srcds_i486 after doing the same CPU checks than in CS:S

Code:

# for Orange Box we have only one build as the new compiler can crunch the CPU variants all into one file
HL=./srcds_i486

fwaggle Wrote:any suggestions ...

Ditch the FreeBSD

No, seriously I'm out of ideas. TF2 doesn't have tuneable tickrate, so you're pretty much stuck just running it "as is". If it doesn't run, then there's nothing you can do.

[fwaggle]

css Wrote:What version are we talking here? Pre-historic, old or new Celeron?

not sure how new it is, i haven't kept up with the ins and outs of hardware since about 1995. all i know is it's 2.4ghz with a 400mhz fsb, but any more information than that i can't get at the moment.

Quote:TF2 doesn't have tuneable tickrate

Soynuts Wrote:(TF2 is forced to 66 tick btw)

i wasn't aware of this.

i just wanted to make sure it wasn't me doing something stupid, because for the life of me i couldn't get TF2 to run in any way acceptable. i can deal with it not working period (i'll just get a faster machine later on), i can't deal with the possibility it might work and i'm just not smart enough to figure out why.

out of curiosity, is there a formula for working out the required CPU, given slots and the desired tickrate, or is it just experience? i've seen other threads where people can rattle off a guesstimate of a number of slots a server can hold, and i was just wondering if that was just because they'd setup a lot of servers or if there's a way to calculate it.

thanks for the replies, they're really helpful.

[css]

fwaggle Wrote:out of curiosity, is there a formula for working out the required CPU, given slots and the desired tickrate, or is it just experience? i've seen other threads where people can rattle off a guesstimate of a number of slots a server can hold, and i was just wondering if that was just because they'd setup a lot of servers or if there's a way to calculate it.

I've seen the guesstimates too. I've never seen clear formula, though. I'd be interested to see some formula.

PS. Nobody knows the CPU stuff anymore. It's not logical anymore when it's not just the MHz that counts. That's why we have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_microprocessors Wikipedia telling us what's the stuff about