CouchMonkey

Well I for one welcome this. Our tournament is doing something similar in terms of a persistant battlefield. Currently though we have the mod the mission file after every 12 hour battleday. Hopefully this idea will take off and it will force BIS to look at the server files and focus on creating a stable platform for more than 20 players to play on. I already see strides, but I hope this become a main goal over there.

Now kids... If you all remember the 203 never had the ironsights when OFP came out. it took the modding community to make them. As for knowing friendlies from OPFOR. Normally I would agree with you but if you have large scale combat, you need to know where your people are without either tatooing names on thier heads or shouting "Hey XXXX shoot in the air to let me know which one you are".

Any notes on this from the programmers? I noticed the demo server goes up to 68 players so we are getting closer . Thanks

I was going to post this in the dedicated server thread but that thing is going all over the place. I wanted to briefly talk about some server experiences I have. For background here are our server specs: Dual AMD Opteron 265 (Dual Core) Processors(4 CPUs) 2GB PC3200 Registered ECC Memory 160 GB Hard Drive 100Mbit dedicated port We own it, we don't share it. Now, as I understand it, ArmA does not currently support multiple cores. So if the processing is dispersed, it will slow things down considerably. The problem as I see it is that unless you have some insane single core machine, there is no way fully experience what ArmA has to offer. With our server we can have multiple smaller servers running which can sustain about 20 or so comfortably but when we try to fit all of our members on on server (about 60) we get server side FPSs of about 10-20. I know it all depends on the mission itself and such. For the mission we are running about 30 objectives with associated triggers. We also have slotted for about 30 players on each side. There is no AI. I am well aware that this in and of itself is taxing but should be well within the scope of advertised 100+ player warfare you all advertise. In addition we have top minds working on the mission file to increase performance so let’s keep the discussion to the hardware or game please. My question is this. Are there any steps being taken to either: A. Reduce the load out required by the server (reduce the system requirements of the server) B. Creation of a dedicated server which can fully utilize multi-core technology. I think you will find that more and more server providers are exclusively offering multi-core server because most servers out there can run perfectly fine on them. ArmA is a different beast all-together. If you would like more information about our mission or our server please let me know. Thanks for your time. -CM

Suma, will you Marry me? Those who run CTI missions and organized tournaments thank you. Any help on this matter would surely be appreciated.

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.

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.

We run on 2003 Standard as well. BIS doesn't have a lot of documentation on a lot of topics. That is why you see a lot of community sites and tutorials.

I agree. In addition, the firendly tag system is linked to the crosshairs. If you dont have the crosshairs, you cant have the tag system. Even if it is on in the server side. These two features need to be separated. I am forced to leave th crosshairs on just so I can have the tags on which is not Kosher in my book.

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.

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

It may be complicated, but it has to be done. If they plan on allowing this game to facilitate 100+ players it has to be able to fully utilize a multi-core server. Period. Our own tests have shown that right now 60+ players are not feasable because the processing overflows from one core to the others thus slowing the system down. Not to mention that the netcode is still a beast. Long and short of it is that no, it is not the number one priority, but it must not be discounted simply because it is hard and not that many games use it.

Oh, looks like there is a miscommunication there :-)

I agree with you, not everyone is using the game for CTI . All I am saying is that it is something that BIS should look at at some point. it is by far not the most important thing that needs to be addressed. I don't mean to come off as complaining, I just wanted to make sure that it is addressed and not thrown to the wind. When you start throwing around 100+ battles, and when the US and UK wave hits, people are going to get very angry.

ummm... http://www.armedassault.com/multiplayer.html

Unfortunately CTI and multicore topics are linked. Normally I would agree with you, but if you are advertising 100+ people battles on your website, and it is not even possible, then your base is going to get upset and it needs to be resolved. In order to do that, multithreading (at least on the server), must be made possible.

Quad cores have theire place. we currently have 3 retail servers running and a demo server running on a quadcore dedicated box. The issue comes when we try to have 60 people at once which more than maxes out one core so we gotta run distributed which is not much better. There is a completely other topic on it in the Multiplayer forum so I dont want to dwell on that here. I think this thread focuses mroe on client side.

Thanks for answering Suma. I know that you guys have a lot on your plate and are working around the clock to solve other pressing issues. I just hope this isn’t discounted completely because as technology progresses, more and more systems will have multi-threading. Especially on the server. I think a good start would be to release a server file which can best utilize it because i am hard pressed to find a premium server that does not have multiple cores. Again, thanks a bunch and keep up the great work.

I turned off VOIP on our servers for that very reason. I honestly dont know why there sint a "push to talk" function on it. All of our members use TS and talking between channel commanders to get the communiction across. As mentioned several times before, find a server with it disabled.

This goes doubly for the server files. Most dedicated servers offered on the market now are multi-core. However there is already a post about this in the Multiplayer forum.

That's a pretty good idea. Thank goodness I am not on a 56k connection Alrighty, back on topic. I am installing the beta on our server now so see if the new beta MP interface resolves the issue.

I hate to be a bother, but is there any update on this? Thanks for your help

Although I don't share my colleague’s pessimism, there does seem to be a heightened degree of trial by fire for this game. Way more than OFP was. There is no official documentation regarding server administration or really anything outside of playing the game. There are bugs and they are being dealt with as fast as possible. Faster than I have seen most game developers do. However since we have to troubleshoot all of this stuff as a community, we should have some visibility of your queue so we know what to expect. Just my humble suggestion. Sorry for the thread hijack, however the opening poster should now have his question answered.

Sickboy, What I am saying is that during the battledays we have no AI, therefore no lag couple be caused by them. However I see you point about the testing. I can say that we had about 20 people on the other night testing out a particular part of our mission. It dealt with chase cams for the admins to monitor the members to watch out for cheaters and to watch the general course of battle. The mission contained 20 slots (all human), minor camera scripts, no weapons, no add-ons, and the stock Sarhani map. The server was cruising at about 22% and about 30-35 Server FPS. It is only slightly better than if I had our full custom mission with 20 players on. Oh, just a heads up, the mission listed above is one piece we merge together (thank you BIS for allowing the merging of missions). Anywho I will try to follow your suggestions sickboy and return my findings. Again, I believe it has more to do with humans connecting that the ancillary factors such as the mission or AI. Also, your comments about not being able to spread the load between servers is false. I constantly see spikes where the load shifts from server to server. The spikes are not uniform so it is not just transferring 100% to the various processors. However it is not smooth either so it isn’t delegating the load very well. I know it sounds weird, but that is what I see ( look at that damn task manager all day long ). Finally When I did set the affinity to one processor I moved all of the other applications to the other cores. It made no difference, the baseline for my server is a constant 4% without my ArmA servers running so divide that by 4 and it isn’t using that much of one core anyway. Shotup: It depends on what you mean: 1. If you mean when I am running army with the affinity set to 1 core, it bumps my other cores to 2-4%. 2. If you mean when I do not have the affinity set, it fluxuates quite a lot. Usually there is one core that takes the brunt of the processing power and the other ones fluxuate quite heavily. 3. I you mean outside of battledays when we have our three servers running (main pub server, and 2 army training servers), then it varies to how many people are connected but the baseline is 4% processor and about a gig of ram being used idling. I would definately reccomend a multicore server if you plan on running several smaller servers. However the purpose of this thread is to figure out if multicore servers are best for large scaled combat simulations.

Alright. So here is what I did. 1. I took our custom mission and enabled the AI. We have about 40 slots per side. 2. Started up the mission as a civilian (we have three sides, Russian, US, and Civvies). 3. The server hung tough at around 25% processor (~1 full core), 300 MB memory used, and 47 server FPS. 4. I have the AI move around a bit (they aren’t scripted because they are just placeholder slots). The server bumped up some, but hung at around 40 FPS. So, from what I can tell it has to do with the number of connections and not the mission file. As I said above, I had the firewall turned on so it was funneling the traffic. I will see what it does this weekend after turning it off and report back here. Note: Most servers that you rent slots from (i.e. 64 slot BF2 servers) do not have the firewalls on at all.