Recent Lag ... and what's being done.

[captainsnarf]

Lots of lag last night. Missing tank turrets and link beams. Definitely CPU related.

Dria crashed. Harder to keep track without the stats page.

[pooty]

So when I was on it was good, until MassD and MinusKS, both which were pretty laggy but those to maps will always be. I've considered trashing them.

Also, I need to start tracking lag events vs. overall machine CPU. A couple times now we've had some lag and our game server CPU was low (< 30%) and the machine CPU > 30% (meanign some other game server/process is using a decent amount of CPU). May make the case for Dedicated server -- just can't get around the cost difference. Now I think we can get a dedicated VM for a decent price, but I am not sure that helps vs. pure dedicated hardware. The other gripe is with a VM or dedicated, we'd have access to more logging/OS tools for diagnostics.

[Anonymous.]

VMs are garbage for performance - too much translation overhead, especially on a shared machine. Not really worth it.

[Enyo]

VMs are garbage for performance - too much translation overhead, especially on a shared machine. Not really worth it.

This is true of VMs for hosting websites, so I could only imagine it’s no better for games. It’s still a shared server, all it takes is for one neighbor’s website (or game) to bog it down with bad code and endless loading errors.

Difference between a dedicated and a VM is night and day, VMs aren’t worth the extra money.

[Canon Fodder]

Maybe for game servers. But where I'm working, we couldn't do what we're doing without VMware. We're 100% VM with Windows servers. For us, it's nice to not have to tie our hardware to the OS, or vice versa. We do hardware upgrades without affecting Windows. But that is the Windows world...

[FuriousRabbit]

A modern VM on modern hardware should see very little overhead (assuming no graphics) as long as a bunch of VMs are not competing for resources. If you only need a few reserved resources on a shared server, the real gain is being able to manage your own OS.

[captainsnarf]

VMs definitely hurt performance depending on the load. The main culprit is cpu cache. A game like UT (running as a server with no gpu required) will fit in cache, but multiple instances will not. You lose a lot of the benefits of modern cpu performance when you are thrashing the cache.

[FuriousRabbit]

You'll have the same problem on a shared server, regardless of whether using a VM or not.

[captainsnarf]

Ok, I'm convinced NFO servers are garbage. I've been playing on HoC, SoL, Omni, and Landlords most of the day, each day since christmas.

I will randomly have games that I have packet loss. The next game, same players, same server, 0 packet loss. Game after, packet loss returns. Nothing changed other than the map. This happens on HoC, SoL, and Omni. All three are hosted by NFO. It's never happened to me on Landlords which is not hosted by NFO. Running 'stat net' is not something I normally did before, but I have been since I noticed lag and yes it seems to be something weird with NFO.

[Super Sanka]

Yeah I've played with snarf on different servers and his story checks out. We both shoot wayyy better on non NFO servers. It's an ancient game and you guys have already done a lot to preserve it. Switching servers (if its more expensive) won't be worth the money with a dying community imo. It is what it is.