P4 And Xeon Ht'ed Servers
SilentErAsEr
Join Date: 2002-12-05 Member: 10483Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2002-12-05 Member: 10483Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">big preformance boost</div> OK after 3 months of testing different ways I have found the biggest way to help jump server performace in p4 and xeon servers is Turn off hyperthreading in the bios !
after tring to get rid of lag in high player count games i tried a number of things I uninstalled metamod / amxmodx ect ran the server pure ran better but still had lag in long games with 20 players at the time i was running 4 servers on a duel xeon 2.8 with 2 gig of ram and 100 mbit connection running windows 2003 server i even killed off 3 of the servers still no difference
took advice and set affinty to 1 of the 4 cpu's shown in the taskman "2 real 2 virtual " still with only one server running it lagged durring a full server on ns maps "note most lag comes durrin ns_map games due to co having no buildings and ns having them" round and round tried pingbooster fixed it but could only run 2 servers. that was not good enough. tried the windows mediaplayer trick. again it fixed it but could only run 3 servers " for those of you that do not know. running windows meida player in a windows server has the same effect as pingbooster it makes the hl server sleep less and consumes more cpu" tried older versions of metamod tried older versions of amxmod and amxmodx then i started thinkin hyperthreading turns 1 cpu into 2 "Virtualy" now hl server cannot use hyper threading so instead of it running twice as good because it could run on 2 or more cpus i notice a discrepance in the stats command in console/hlsw and the actual reported cpu useage in taskman it was 50% off. hlsw would show 80% when full and fps of 10 with high lag"pings in the 200's" and taskman was only showing 40% cpu useage
even setting afinty to only 1 cpu showed the same. what i have come to belive and my tests have proven is with hyperthreading on you are only gettin around half of the avalible cpu so it is running on virtualy 1.4 of a 2.8 ghz proc. after turning off hyperthreading in the bios my hlsw and taskman now report the same cpu useage i am now running 6 servers and even when i have 60+ player across the servers the lag is not there ping dropped from avarage of 90 to a average of 60 full servers avarage around 70 ping. I am sure some of you Op's out there already cae to this conclussion yourselfs but i thought i would post this for those whom didn't "net affect hl server cannot use HT tecknowlagy and are hurt when it is active so turn it off.
<a href='http://www.2frag4fun.com' target='_blank'>www.2frag4fun.com</a> i now run 1 20 man cs 1.6 server 1 dod 12 man server 1 ns 14 man 1 ns 16 man 1 ns 20 man and a 8 man hl2mp server granted all servers are never full and i would prolly need to cut out the dod and hl2mp if they started to be but you will get alot more out of your server with
after tring to get rid of lag in high player count games i tried a number of things I uninstalled metamod / amxmodx ect ran the server pure ran better but still had lag in long games with 20 players at the time i was running 4 servers on a duel xeon 2.8 with 2 gig of ram and 100 mbit connection running windows 2003 server i even killed off 3 of the servers still no difference
took advice and set affinty to 1 of the 4 cpu's shown in the taskman "2 real 2 virtual " still with only one server running it lagged durring a full server on ns maps "note most lag comes durrin ns_map games due to co having no buildings and ns having them" round and round tried pingbooster fixed it but could only run 2 servers. that was not good enough. tried the windows mediaplayer trick. again it fixed it but could only run 3 servers " for those of you that do not know. running windows meida player in a windows server has the same effect as pingbooster it makes the hl server sleep less and consumes more cpu" tried older versions of metamod tried older versions of amxmod and amxmodx then i started thinkin hyperthreading turns 1 cpu into 2 "Virtualy" now hl server cannot use hyper threading so instead of it running twice as good because it could run on 2 or more cpus i notice a discrepance in the stats command in console/hlsw and the actual reported cpu useage in taskman it was 50% off. hlsw would show 80% when full and fps of 10 with high lag"pings in the 200's" and taskman was only showing 40% cpu useage
even setting afinty to only 1 cpu showed the same. what i have come to belive and my tests have proven is with hyperthreading on you are only gettin around half of the avalible cpu so it is running on virtualy 1.4 of a 2.8 ghz proc. after turning off hyperthreading in the bios my hlsw and taskman now report the same cpu useage i am now running 6 servers and even when i have 60+ player across the servers the lag is not there ping dropped from avarage of 90 to a average of 60 full servers avarage around 70 ping. I am sure some of you Op's out there already cae to this conclussion yourselfs but i thought i would post this for those whom didn't "net affect hl server cannot use HT tecknowlagy and are hurt when it is active so turn it off.
<a href='http://www.2frag4fun.com' target='_blank'>www.2frag4fun.com</a> i now run 1 20 man cs 1.6 server 1 dod 12 man server 1 ns 14 man 1 ns 16 man 1 ns 20 man and a 8 man hl2mp server granted all servers are never full and i would prolly need to cut out the dod and hl2mp if they started to be but you will get alot more out of your server with
Comments
best option for intel servers is to disable hyperthreading, and if you must run more than one server on a box, just run as many instances of hlds as you have cpus. so if you have 2 cpus, 2 hlds, 4 cpus, 4 hlds. etc
also i strongly advise aginst using hl booster. it was designed to work with won servers, not steam servers. not to mention it eats your cpu like mad with little or no return.
if you want more performance out of hlds, just increase the sys_ticrate to something like 300 or 500 if you have a super beefy server.
you server doesnt need to be running at 500 or 1000 fps to be lag free, the default fps is fine, as long as it doesnt get way down to 15-25. if thats the case, just increase the sys_ticrate untill its at a stable 60 or 72 or so.
and @GiGaBite i run 5 servers it is your total player count you should watch and balence between the cpu's not the number of servers i run about 36 players ns on 1 cpu and 40 players cs 1.6 on the other duel xeon 2.8's with 2 gig of ram duel 100/10 connects with 1tb of bandwidth a month on a 100 mb internet connection. now i am sure some lag would show if all the ns servers were loaded but 1 is normaly idle while the other 2 are @ max players and the cs normaly only have half max
certainly running a app such as media player, helps increase the fps (also using sys_ticrate) but mediaplayer 9/10 causes cpu lag in itself for me, i mplayer.exe which is the original non skinned one.
Well done for finding a solution you are happy with.
Imp