Time for Dedicated Server?

[pooty]

So much discussion about how a dedicated server would help the performance, although I think now with lower tick rate and UTComp its decent. We have some vehicles that are harder on the server and maps that are harder on the server than other ONS servers (CEONSS, DW, etc. maybe RMD comes close?).
I used to be able to see Hardware type on NFO, and can't find it, but I sent them a support request about it.
They have dedicated servers here: https://www.nfoservers.com/order-dedicated-server.php

One thing we could do that we can't do today, is create additional UT servers on that box, so we could have a "test" server.

Bad news its a bit more expensive. About 120 month. Today we pay 112 every 3 months. That includes the game, redirect and this forum. All managed, backed up etc, by NFO. With dedicated server I think we have enough experience to manage it, assuming NFO does daily backups for us like they do now. So its $436 year vs. $1440 a year. Right now we have $497 in the account, we can use that towards anything NFO but we can't pull it out.

Several have mentioned they'd pony up for a faster server. And we could try it out for a few months and see if its acutally better. Meaning we can keep everything as is, provision a new dedicated server and test it.

When I hear back from nfo support I'll post the hardware specs. I think the CPU single core performance is what really matters, network is fine, Disks are fine, its the single thread CPU performance we care about and we can compare performance benchmarks and see.

[pooty]

Having discussion with NFO right now, they are pretty quick to respond, even on a Sunday. Intel Xeon 4 GHz. Getting the full specs.

[pooty]

Ok,
So what I've gotten from them is that when we look in the NFO panel, the CPU shows CPU usage of our Game server, meaning we are driving it to 60% CPU at peaks. I've seen at 45% plus we start to get some lag. This is just US, not the entire server. NFO support pointed out that that graph may have spikes of 100% that aren't capture on the graphs since its 5 min avg. So I could see that easily if we average ~62% (peak last night).

Good news is NFO offered to move us to a slightly faster machine to see if that helps (no extra charge). I'll say pretty happy that they've offered some solutions instead of just pushing us to the more expensive dedicated server right away.

I'll keep us updated

[captainsnarf]

They have managed dedicated servers. That would probably be best, unless you want to do backups, patches, etc. I know I don't

[McLovin]

...
Bad news its a bit more expensive. About 120 month. Today we pay 112 every 3 months. That includes the game, redirect and this forum. All managed, backed up etc, by NFO. With dedicated server I think we have enough experience to manage it, assuming NFO does daily backups for us like they do now. So its $436 year vs. $1440 a year. Right now we have $497 in the account, we can use that towards anything NFO but we can't pull it out.

Several have mentioned they'd pony up for a faster server. And we could try it out for a few months and see if its acutally better. Meaning we can keep everything as is, provision a new dedicated server and test it.
...

I'm all for a bigger server, but will our budget be able to sustain it? $436/year is easy to fill, but $1440 sounds out of our reach to me. What was our draw the first time we did a fundraiser? Throw out the big-time lifetime donors, they were outliers. Doubt we would see those types of donations again.

[pooty]

So they have offered to move us to a faster server. It will change the server IP address. I asked exactly how much faster, as the IP change is disruptive as you have to re-favorite the server again. Right now holding off moving until I see how much faster it is.

WRT to donations, we've taken in about $1200 since March 2021. We've only had a donation drive that once and several folks have been quite generous > $100 mark. But we only had about a dozen donate.

Given right now we have over a year remaining, its pretty cost effective.

For a Managed, Dedicated Server is about $140 month, they manage software, OS. So getting over $1500 a year.

To me I'd say move the server as offered by NFO and see if that helps. If not we can probably look at our UT configs again, we might be hitting an engine type limit (we are fine on network (1Gb) and disk), its really CPU and/or engine where bottleneck is.

[pooty]

Ok my bad, the IP will stay the same, I misunderstood what they were telling me.

I told them to go ahead and move it (forum and redirect are unaffected, this is just game server). They said its about 15% increase, so figured lets try it and see, a good test before plunking down 1500 a year...

[pooty]

They said it should be done in about 45 minutes or so....

[Enyo]

They also have virtual private servers that have better performance than what we're on, but not as expensive as dedicated.

I know virtual servers do help a lot with website loading speeds, no idea how much it helps games though. Thoughts?

[trans_lux]

Cool looking forward to any improvements.
Also, I'd be up for a meaningful donation again.
Maybe everyone that donates gets immortalized with a Zsound