FC3 - Poor Performance

[Terroth]

Second time writing this out, damn reset button!

Hey guys, I was running MDK on my box, yes I know evil, thats why I installed FC3. But with FC3 im getting extremely bad performance. When I had Mandrake installed, the box ran great.

When a new round starts I get a choke spike to about 30-50, then it dies down, this happens no matter how many players. When the server picks up to about 14+ players, there is constant choke whenever you are near another player. When you are at about 20-22 players+, the server is extremely laggy and skippy, unplayable.

This is basicly a default install of FC3, running kernel 2.6.9SMP, and the NIC is at full duplex for reference. The box is running dual opterons, 3 gig ram, and scsi hard drives.

This is very unacceptable, and replacing the OS is the last thing I want to do as the box is already colocated, and replacing it would cost me a small fourtion. Any ideas?



Thanks,
Dan.

[reclusivemonkey]

Terroth Wrote:Hey guys, I was running MDK on my box, yes I know evil, thats why I installed FC3. But with FC3 im getting extremely bad performance. When I had Mandrake installed, the box ran great.

Equally evil IMHO. Slack rules!

Terroth Wrote:When a new round starts I get a choke spike to about 30-50, then it dies down, this happens no matter how many players. When the server picks up to about 14+ players, [snip] Any ideas?

You can use top to find out what's putting strain on the box. AFAIK, FC3 comes with SELinux, so it may be something to do with that. Choke sounds like a networking issue to be but I could be talking out my ass.

[Terroth]

Anyone have any info on SELinux? Im clueless on it.

[cryotek]

SELinux is Security Enhanced Linux. Its a kernel source that was developed by some people at the NSA http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/

Most of the choke someone would get is poor configuration of the client rates.

High ping could be bad datacenter routing. or youcan be having issues with your isp.

Oh, Gentoo > slackware > FC3 > Mandrake.


Try another kernel source, maybe vanilla sources

[Terroth]

Last time I tried to compile a kernel I put it into a kernel panic, I don't do that anymore. And the pings are great, nothing could be better with them. The choke isnt ping related, thats why I think something is crazy with my FC3. I am really really stuck here, ideas would be great.

[reclusivemonkey]

The only thing I can think of is to install Ethereal and see whats happening to the packets. On my *client*, my rate seems to be affected mostly by my rate more than anything else. Have you looked at what is actually going on with the server when this is happening? Have you checked the CPU/Memory usage? You may find this link helpful in relating networking to SRCDS;

http://www.valve-erc.com/srcsdk/general/multiplayer_networking.html

[Terroth]

I am running my box from command line using Putty, any overview of what to do with Ethereal from there?

[reclusivemonkey]

Terroth Wrote:I am running my box from command line using Putty, any overview of what to do with Ethereal from there?

Nope sorry this is all way over my head. I just run a 900Mhz 194Mb RAM spare machine on my home DSL line! I would check to see what's going on with the machine before you start to try and figure out the networking. Try this; set up a cron job to run free -m and uptime at certain periods (say every fifteen minutes). This will tell you if your CPU or memory is lacking. Here is mine;

My Server Monitoring

Incidentally, what do you have your tickrate set to?

I can't help but think that there is something going awry with the machine rather than the networking. I am presuming you have all the ports correctly forwarded? From my limited understanding of SRCDS, if you are getting choke, it sounds like the information is queing up on your server. Can you send your server.cfg? Do you have any min/max rate settings in there?