07-02-2008, 07:20 AM
First of all, this forum has been a fantastic resource for me for the last few weeks. I've been working on standing up a TF2 server for the clan I'm in and have spent a lot of time playing with hardware and software tweaks.
My initial hardware was a 2GHz celeron box (2GB RAM, IDE drives) on a 100Mb/s connection running Fedora 8. I tried to take a guess at how many slots the machine could handle based on other threads here. I was hoping for 10-16 TF2 slots. Well, if I was running an HL2DM server, maybe, but from what I can figure out TF2 is about the most processor intensive of the HL2-based multiplayer games.
Without any tweaks, the celeron box fell on it's face after about 6 players. Lag skyrocketed and the game became unplayable. After that experience, I read up on the forums and made the following tweaks:
- 1000Hz kernel
- Kernel compiled to be optimized for celeron
- 66 tick, 500FPS srcds
Even with these tweaks, the server alone was taking up 20% CPU, and every player that joined up was taking up another 10% CPU each. Again, by about 7 or 8 players, the box was totally cooked.
I removed that machine, and replaced it with a 2x dual core 2.0GHz Opteron with 4GB RAM and SATA disks. I know the extra cores won't make any difference, but at least they can handle the OS and its needs. This box has CentOS which has a tickless kernel, and I have it optimized for AMD processors. The results were better, but still not what I expected. Running at 66ticks and 450FPS, the server only takes up 1-2% at idle. Each player that connects adds about 5-6% CPU load on the core the process is pegged on (I'm launching it with taskset -c 1).
A 6v6 game on this machine is playable, tho the ping times creep up for some reason. FPS remains at about 350, which is all I really want anyway. Once we start getting to 14 -16 players, the box gets towards 80-90% CPU load on the one core and things (as expected) fall apart.
I've got a pair of 2.8GHz Opterons being shipped to me, which should hopefully get me up towards a 20 slot server. I guess my questions are the following:
- Are my performance numbers normal? I see a LOT of 24 and even hacked up 32 slot servers out there. I assumed that a 2.0GHz opteron could run at least a 24 slot server without breaking a sweat... but that's clearly not my case.
- If I was on Intel CPU's, would my situation be different? any idea on what a 2.8GHz Xeon would handle as far as slots and performance?
- What in the heck are ppl running to make 32 slot servers happen? I presume it's Intel hardware with 3.4GHz+ clocks, but even then I'm having a hard time seeing it.
Am I missing any simple tweaks? Or is this about normal. Thanks all
My initial hardware was a 2GHz celeron box (2GB RAM, IDE drives) on a 100Mb/s connection running Fedora 8. I tried to take a guess at how many slots the machine could handle based on other threads here. I was hoping for 10-16 TF2 slots. Well, if I was running an HL2DM server, maybe, but from what I can figure out TF2 is about the most processor intensive of the HL2-based multiplayer games.
Without any tweaks, the celeron box fell on it's face after about 6 players. Lag skyrocketed and the game became unplayable. After that experience, I read up on the forums and made the following tweaks:
- 1000Hz kernel
- Kernel compiled to be optimized for celeron
- 66 tick, 500FPS srcds
Even with these tweaks, the server alone was taking up 20% CPU, and every player that joined up was taking up another 10% CPU each. Again, by about 7 or 8 players, the box was totally cooked.
I removed that machine, and replaced it with a 2x dual core 2.0GHz Opteron with 4GB RAM and SATA disks. I know the extra cores won't make any difference, but at least they can handle the OS and its needs. This box has CentOS which has a tickless kernel, and I have it optimized for AMD processors. The results were better, but still not what I expected. Running at 66ticks and 450FPS, the server only takes up 1-2% at idle. Each player that connects adds about 5-6% CPU load on the core the process is pegged on (I'm launching it with taskset -c 1).
A 6v6 game on this machine is playable, tho the ping times creep up for some reason. FPS remains at about 350, which is all I really want anyway. Once we start getting to 14 -16 players, the box gets towards 80-90% CPU load on the one core and things (as expected) fall apart.
I've got a pair of 2.8GHz Opterons being shipped to me, which should hopefully get me up towards a 20 slot server. I guess my questions are the following:
- Are my performance numbers normal? I see a LOT of 24 and even hacked up 32 slot servers out there. I assumed that a 2.0GHz opteron could run at least a 24 slot server without breaking a sweat... but that's clearly not my case.
- If I was on Intel CPU's, would my situation be different? any idea on what a 2.8GHz Xeon would handle as far as slots and performance?
- What in the heck are ppl running to make 32 slot servers happen? I presume it's Intel hardware with 3.4GHz+ clocks, but even then I'm having a hard time seeing it.
Am I missing any simple tweaks? Or is this about normal. Thanks all