Ht And Taskset

strikeforce · August 2004

<div class="IPBDescription">What happens for multiple servers</div> I had a quick question after reading the sticky's I'm still trying to figure out whether my computer can handle 3 ns servers assuming 22 players per server.

It runs the latest hlds and also runs the latest Fedora Core 2 on it as well. We have erratic pings as well as running the command stats in console it goes up to 100% cpu usage and fps ranges at that point 1 all the way up to 77fps.

What I don't know is whether its the box or whether its the fact of where we have colocated the server. Is there software that you know of that can measure it and give me a reasonable idea of whether tis the box. The specs are as follows:

e.g.
CPU In Out Uptime Users FPS Players
35.00 9.20 9.04 2987 100 8.85 11

This is one example of one server.

Gigabyte GA-8IG1000MK Motherboard 865G,FSB800,AGP8X,DUAL CHL4DDR400,2SATA,AC97,VGA,LAN
Intel Pentium 4 2.6GHz Processor - 800FSB P4-2.6Ghz/512K/0.13u/S478/800MhzFSB/HYPER THREADING READY
1GB Memory 2 X 512MB DDR 400MHz
250 watt Midi Tower Case
Floppy Drive 1.44MB
Seagate 80GB Hard Drive - Serial ATA 7200.7RPM,8.5MS,8MB,SATA,3 YR WRNTY

I have turned off SMP. Also is there a quick way of finding out what the kernel HZ is at?

According to the param.h file under the source directory I have HZ set to 1000 as the default setting for the "bloated" Fedora Core 2 kernel.

I'm still leaning to the connection being the cause of it? Any other suggestions?

Vadakill · August 2004

For Fedora Core 2, it is 1000 Hz. The thing that worries me a little is how low your FPS is reporting as, to me this looks like the server is "starving" for CPU timeslices.

I would try running one server for a day or two, keeping tabs on CPU usage, FPS and bandwidth. Then, if that seems ok, add another server while you continue to monitor those resources.

Based on my experience, you should not have any problem running multiple combat servers on your setup, provided you have the necessary bandwidth. However, once you have NS classic running, you will have the additional overhead of the larger maps (which have more entities), placeable structures and OC/turret AI to think about.

strikeforce · August 2004

I had a look at another server which was lagging all the players out and when in console typing status it came back with wierd details.

fps was 80
cpu was 80

Now to me that seems a bit wierd since we have usual pings of 30-40 then they jumped up to 100-200?

On a side note.

If I was to host 2 22 player servers classic. The bandwidth of 1024kb/s up or 2x DSL 512 up connections would that be sufficient bandwidth?

My understanding is that players use 3kb/s upload since the majority of the players I'm talking about are dsl users. I get the 3kb/s from my computer when playing.

Vadakill · August 2004

If you were typing that in on the client (ie rcon stats), that always seems to give funky results, I'm not sure why.

If you had two 512k DSL connections running on the server you'd have to somehow loadbalance them. Since I don't have much experience with loadbalancing that type of connection I'll leave that up to you to figure out.

The more players on a server the more bandwidth you will use. Everyone will send the same amount of bandwidth to the server, usually between 2-4K a sec but the calculations and the results have to be sent to all clients. Expect outgoing bandwidth to climb higher then incoming bandwidth, on a 20 player server it can peak as high as 600kbps (see graph)

<a href='http://www.vadakill.com/files/bandwidthComparitive.png' target='_blank'>Bandwidth Graph</a>

strikeforce · August 2004

So assuming 2 servers are run full which is highly improbably seeing that 1 is a dedicated war server and the max players playing is 12 so 1x 1024 shdsl should be fine. Or 1 megabit connection should be sufficient to cater for that.

By my Calculations which are listed for convenience's sake.

6 k/bit per sec download from the client X 22 = 132 so assuming synchronous 1x 512 /512 connection should be sufficient to run a 22 player server.

How I'm going to get it to handle 1024 is using a netcomm agrigator I've heard it works wonders. Do a google if you have a few mins.

cracker_jackmac · September 2004

Load balancing would require either a Layer-4 switch with Virtual IP balancing, or 3 routers with BGP or IGRP.

In short, too expensive to even investigate or make it even worth while.

strikeforce · September 2004

No it wouldn't cost that much. I'm probably not explaining myself correctly which is highly probably and I apologise.

I'll give you a link to product I'm going to be investigating to see whether dual dsl connection can be load balanced together to be sufficient to provide quality servers to the public thats all.

<a href='http://www.netcomm.com.au/shdsl/aggregator.php' target='_blank'>http://www.netcomm.com.au/shdsl/aggregator.php</a>

I suppose that'll explain.

Ht And Taskset

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