Why are server requirements so high?
FlyveHest
Join Date: 2012-11-02 Member: 165847Members
Join Date: 2012-11-02 Member: 165847Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Its almost ridiculous</div>Hi all,
I setup a NS2 server closely after launch, but haven't had time to play on it before yesterday, where I found out that performance on the server is pretty atrocious, server-side stuttering (as ping was <30 all the time), and the perf meter in the serverbrowser was below 30 when I joined.
Its running vanilla, 16 slots, nothing fancy and nothing else is running on the server.
So, I found the post about the requirements for running a server, and I was pretty baffled, why in the world are the NS2 servers requirements so high? I mean, I am running 10 Left 4 Dead 2 servers on a similar machine (running virtualized under ESXi), this is potentially 80 players with loads of AI controlled zombies and that runs without a hiccup, but 16 players, no AI and nothing else on the server, and NS2 is very near to being unplayable.
I really would like to host some NS2s for our small gaming community, but thats not going to happen if the requirements are so high.
Does anyone know why? Some words from a dev would be really nice, because I can see no real reason for the requirements to be so astronomical.
I setup a NS2 server closely after launch, but haven't had time to play on it before yesterday, where I found out that performance on the server is pretty atrocious, server-side stuttering (as ping was <30 all the time), and the perf meter in the serverbrowser was below 30 when I joined.
Its running vanilla, 16 slots, nothing fancy and nothing else is running on the server.
So, I found the post about the requirements for running a server, and I was pretty baffled, why in the world are the NS2 servers requirements so high? I mean, I am running 10 Left 4 Dead 2 servers on a similar machine (running virtualized under ESXi), this is potentially 80 players with loads of AI controlled zombies and that runs without a hiccup, but 16 players, no AI and nothing else on the server, and NS2 is very near to being unplayable.
I really would like to host some NS2s for our small gaming community, but thats not going to happen if the requirements are so high.
Does anyone know why? Some words from a dev would be really nice, because I can see no real reason for the requirements to be so astronomical.
Comments
The team is working hard on improving performance, but their main focus has been gameplay, because you CAN in fact play the game, but comparing NS2 to L4D2 is ridiculous. This is an indie game, they are not a triple A producer, they still have work to do even after launch.
However this is just from my personal experience, and what I've read around, if anyone can clarify even more I would love that.
And when my i7 processor can't even run the game at full resolution at any graphics settings, that just shows me that there is still work for them to do. But thank god it's their own engine, so they can mess around with the game just the way they want, and they can still improve the game as much as they want.
My last words would be patience, it will all get better in time, and honestly compared to the early alpha stages and most of the actual beta this game was 100% unplayable for me, but now it's actually in a playable state, so my advice would be for you to just sit down, relax and play some games on the real servers untill they can get some more fixes in to hopefully improve performance :)
If I compare the current Build 228 with the first Alpha Build ever, Build 228 runs 100% better than the first Alpha Build. Back then I only had 10 - 15 FPS on decent settings, now I have 25 - 40 FPS on highest settings.
Another thing is, that the state of the Server can affect your performance/gameplay as well. It is always best only to join servers with a performance of 75+ (in my opinion).
That's about the Client.
I think there are still more memory management issues in the Server Software itself and I can't really understand it, why a Server Software needs PhysX. Why is the Server Software calculating Client-Side physics anyway? This is really strange.
Having to have OCed CPUs just to run a single 16 slot server is just wrong, and I think the game will suffer from it, if the perf metric on the serverlist is correct, there are plenty of the official servers that are struggling to keep up, and this just leads to a poor impression of an otherwise pretty fantastic game.
I really hope that they are prioritizing server performance, so players will get the best experience possible.
<!--quoteo(post=2009634:date=Nov 4 2012, 04:02 PM:name=Maxunit)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Maxunit @ Nov 4 2012, 04:02 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2009634"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I think there are still more memory management issues in the Server Software itself and I can't really understand it, why a Server Software needs PhysX. Why is the Server Software calculating Client-Side physics anyway? This is really strange.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That had me puzzled as well, it might just be a dependency that they haven't removed.
<img src="http://yttusyttus.eu/pics/serverp.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Server specs I7 975 @ 3.6 Ghz with 24gb of RAM on 100mbit up/down. The 975 is no longer a spring chicken and running nowhere near 4.4 Ghz :)
I have an NS1 server running 300fps, 30 players, lots of plugins and only uses 50% of one core.
My NS2 server is running 30fps (at best) with 16 players, vanilla and maxxes out a core.
I can't think why an NS2 server might have so much extra (real) work to do.
Looking forward to some server & client optimisations.
LUA
If you running the ns2 box in ESXI make sure you change your VM's cpu resource shares to higher then normal.
It's possible that there is another issue, such as the processor down-clocking itself using one of many technologies. These can cause any server, at ANY clockspeed so suffer horrible performance, similar to what you have. But then again, so does running a slow cpu, so we can't tell without knowing specs.
However, server performance has improved quite dramatically over the course of the beta. Those 4.4GHz OCd beasts used to have trouble handling 8 players in the early beta.
It's possible that there is another issue, such as the processor down-clocking itself using one of many technologies. These can cause any server, at ANY clockspeed so suffer horrible performance, similar to what you have. But then again, so does running a slow cpu, so we can't tell without knowing specs.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Its a dualcore 2.7ghz machine (2 of 8 HT cores on an older I7 920 running under ESXi)
As mentioned, I have a similarly specced VM machine on the same server, that runs 10 L4D2 servers smoothly.
I really hope that they get the servercode optimized, so more people will be able to host servers, I know my community would love one of these.
I use debian squeeze + wine and no probleme.
before i've launch 1 server 24slot and gameplay is horrible
The reason why a fast instruction execution rate of the CPU is required by the NS2 engine is because it interprets a lot of Lua scripts, as NS2 is largely written in Lua. I am sure dividing and balancing the work load to several CPU threads, and decreasing the execution times / tick, is one of the priorities for the UWE team, so performance will increase greatly later on into the development.