Need some Feedback on those Server stats.

Maxunit

Heyo NS2 Server Ops.

I'm currently running a NS2 Dedicated on a new Linux Machine (Debian 6.0.6 with WINE 1.4.1) with an Intel Quad Core 3.4 Ghz, this one to be precise:
http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4

Here's an image from the TOP command, which displays CPU usage etc pp:



Here's one from the Web Admin:



And here is stats page from DeviceNull:

http://ns2servers.devicenull.org/servers/174465/5.9.122.34:27015

Now...I have the Server running without assigning any kind of priorities to the CPU usage and it seems to run stable so far. Could I raise the player slots a bit (like from 16 to 18 or 20) without a big impact on performance?

Greetings,

Maxunit

ScardyBob

Depends on what you mean by big. Increasing the playercount will generally increase the amount of time the server will be in the "high entity/tickrate drop" region of performance. The threshold in which this becomes unacceptable is different for each person, but I wouldn't up the playercount until you see how it holds up under sustained high entity conditions (e.g. repeated, more than several minutes with >1000 entities) as those are the times server performance drops the most.

For example, here's one of the KKG servers: http://ns2servers.devicenull.org/servers/60740/74.117.238.140:27015
Many of the sub-30 tickrate drops correspond with a higher than 1000 entity count.

My personal preference is to go for lower playercount and smoother performance than higher playercount and less smooth performance, but you may want to run your server differently.

Maxunit

I think 16 Slot Servers are good already, so that 8vs8 matches can run. I'm not sure, what the player base generally prefers. Be it 4vs4, 5vs5, 6vs6, 7vs7 or 8vs8. I prefer the 8vs8 approach, tho. Thank's for the info tho. Running NS2 Servers on Linux with WINE is still a thing for itself, since UWE (or third-parties) have not released native linux binaries so far

ScardyBob

My personal preference is no smaller than 6v6 and no larger than 10v10. However, quite a few people enjoy the full 12v12 matches.

Maxunit

Question is: If the current Server runs that well...could I even consider running a 2nd Server with 6vs6? Or would that blow up the server machine? :P

ScardyBob

Maxunit wrote: »

Question is: If the current Server runs that well...could I even consider running a 2nd Server with 6vs6? Or would that blow up the server machine? :P

Yeah, that's actually the standard setup for most people renting/operating whole server machines. The most common setup is to run one less than the number of cores public servers and one private server. For example, on a quadcore, you could run 3 public servers and 1 private server perfectly fine (presuming you have sufficient upload and at least 2GB per server instance).