Server Performance

[-ASW-AllShotUp 0]

Thanks Couch Monkey for the info - yeah we are going to switch into a multi-core, raid 1 machines here in the next few days.

We finished some network tests last night from Europe and the Mideast, since we have a lot of members in those areas so we believe we are all set now...hopefully...

[Auss 208]

We have in our OFP server 2 dual core 275 series CPU'S running 64bit server 2003 with 2x 80 gig Hdds running raid 0 with 4gig RAM

I have 2 demos running on CPU0 1 per each core and on the other CPU I have full game spread across both cores on CPU1. I have set this up with Deamon tools. I have stopped all uneccesary services except bare esentials and the TS server is bound to CPU0 core 2.

From what I have found over the years with OFP and watching task manager, it gets back to a couple of things.

1st- how well the mission is made i.e cleanup scripts This makes a huge difference as a poorly made mission will stress the server even with 8-10 players

2nd Amount of Players on server. More players that Join the lower the FPS will drop, its all about how many players are on the server. Thats it no amount of tweaking will give u the magical fix that we all seek.

I've been playing with this topic for years with OFP and it seems the AA exe shows Exactly the same symtoms as the OFP dedicated exe. I have reconfigured, rebuilt, tweaked, jumped up and down, prayed to the god of FPS.

My Thoughts? I have none...LOL I have given up looking for the magical tweak as it dont exsist, we must simply do the best with what we can afford, When OFP was on the server I also weeded out the poorly made missions in an attempt at removing that problem area.

[SWAT_BigBear 0]

Your TS and the amount of players on it count as bandwidth and may hurt games. We run a Ventrilo with high codecs but had to put it on our 2nd server due to...over 10 on coms would lag the game servers. Standard codecs would let about 30+ on coms before lag started.

But we are on an older dual(proc, not cores) Amd 2800, 2 gig ram.

[CouchMonkey 0]

We run out our TS, web server, and game server on three different machines.

[Espectro (DayZ) 0]

Demo users reported alot better performance with the new .exe. I just think we need to wait for BI to release the patch to us full-gamers.

Also, you using winxp or vista?

Cause when I host on Vista I see no fps drop weather it's 1 or 10 people on it (or very litle), while on winxp, It's dropping around 6 fps. (from 1 to 10. My connection is, however, not good enough to have anything playable if more than 10 people are connected.

Oh, my system specs.

AMD64 3800+ X2 dualcore

2 * geforce 7600GT SLI (But only using one in Vista, due to lack of SLI support atm).

2 gb dual-ram.

[CouchMonkey 0]

Client side is fine. i get about 50 FPS on XP.

Server side is a different animal all together. The server has it's own FPS and that is typically good to gague overall performance.

I too have used the demo and the client size is definately a lot smoother. Part of our test this weekend will be to stress the demo server as well as the actual game server. My guess is even on the stock CTI mission, the server FPS will dip really low.

[rekrul 7]

I installed XP on a P4 2.4Ghz with 1GB RAM on a E3 line (34Mbps) thinking it would be enough as the recommended system was 2Ghz 512MB. Boy was I disapointed when I saw the dedicated server had 24 FPS with just me there and 4 FPS with ~10 players.

The only thing installed on the server is ArmA and VNC. I quit VNC too just to be sure, but it didn't have an impact. I sure hope that a) server performance picks up and b) we get a Linux version sooner than schedualed.

[terox 316]

Have you any information on user bandwidth

eg comparison in % of OFP usage

I am trying to forecast the annual running costs of our server, in preparation for the linux release

[CouchMonkey 0]

Welcome to the club Rekrul.

it isnt your server, it is the fact that you have more than 4 people on your server will drop the FPS like no ones business.

Doing some more testing, we have determined that in fact the problem with server FPS has to do with the number of connections.

Also there seems to be some sort of memory leak. I don't know if it because of the dead bodies (after 4 hours, they pile up) or something else.

We also tested the CTI mission on our beta server. Baseline is 44 server FPS. We have 32 people join and it dropped to 4 FPS.

BF2 had better frame rates. Something is going on.

[sniperandy 0]

@Crouch Monkey,

I was thinking this during yesterday session actually.

For battles that scale you guys should use a delete body script.

So that the mess is cleaned up after a while.

We're running a dedicated server for the arma demo over at ArmAmods.net.

And the server FPS drops from around 45-50 FPS to 4-7 FPS soon as there is 4-5 players on it playing the CTI. CPU load is insane as well. It shoots to a constant 100% soon as there is a few people on that CTI.

The demo server is running on a Pentium 4 with 2.8ghz with 1GB of ram on a shared 7GBit line.

[CouchMonkey 0]

We already have that planned for next weeks battle. However that only helps with the server degridation. Even in the inital load we only get 6 frames a second on the server.

[suma 8]

We have found a bug in the server compilation process which caused the server to be less optimized than it should. The same issue is affecting the demo build, but not the full game build. (Note: The demo build 5116 is already fixed and fully optimized)

We expect the next server release should perform much better.

(For those interested: the bug was the automated upgrader of the Visual Studio project did not change some settings when transition from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005 to reflect the changed meaning of some options, and as a result the project has turned most optimizations off).

[Auss 208]

@ Suma, I and many other appreciate you dropping into chat to us and letting us know of these fixes cheers

One question I have in regards to the full game server.exe. Is there anything you can suggest to assist us in optimizing our servers? I have struggled for many years to achieve decent FPS when big matches are playing, especially CTI'S I have done all the optimizations that you recommend on the WIKI. I know this is a big question and I'm not expecting miracles, we do have a very powerful server but I can see problems once the English version is released and we start to see large numbers of players joining especially when CTI'S are released.

[CouchMonkey 0]

Suma, will you Marry me?

Those who run CTI missions and organized tournaments thank you.

Any help on this matter would surely be appreciated.

[deady 0]

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Looking forward to 5117