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VM vs Dedicated Hardware - holy crap..


_Lance_

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So for about the last two years I've been hosting a dayz server (now servers) from my company's datacenter (I work for an msp/cloud host) - It's been a smooth run and I've gotten pretty steady results from the vms (hyperv, server 2012 r2, 4 x e5-2660v3's, 3par flash interconnected with 128 fiberchannel) but we recently setup a new replication datacenter at our office, added a fiber connection, so I've decided to move my stuff do dedicated hardware and host from there. We had a spare proliant gl380p and I've snatched that up and I also had an older poweredge t300, and rather than run multiple games off of one host I decided to just use each server to run a single instance just for giggles. I setup the t300 first since it's the slower of the two, so I'd have a good idea what the bottom line fps/performance was going to be, connected from home last night and HOLY CRAP - I can't believe how much better these servers run on dedicated hardware. I copied everything over from my virtual machines, and adjusted the basic.cfg for the higher bandwidth, made no other changes, and where I was getting an average of 65-70 fps on the vm's, last night I was seeing 125-135 fps on the exact same setup as the live server, but running on real hardware - I just wanted to share this experience and also ask, has anyone else ever switched from vm to hardware and seen that big of a performance increase? It makes me realize that probably 99% of the servers I've played on over the years were vm's, and the really fast server which were few and far between were probably real dedicated servers. Sorry for the rambling post, I"m still kind of in shock lol.

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i just want to say.. i was hosting an epoch server by 1 year in a vm. One day the conection with the vm just fall down. (one week).

the problem?

The company had no pay the internet connection.

Was Fckn Epic.....

the connection with the vm was restored after one week,, but ...was not the same :laugh:.

and also i was hosting a dayz mod server from my pc.. ( its not a super pc..) but i had nice response from it with 15 players (not more cuz my pc could exploit :biggrin:)

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I was with nitrado when I took over an epoch server from a friend. But I then (after 1 year) realised that the performance was going down due to me doing more scripts and stuff on my server.

I then went to rent a dedi server and was hugely impressed by the performance difference. Most noticable by the AI which shot me so fast I couldnt even react.

In the end I had 3 servers running from this one dedi box for 4 years without problems. :)

Worth the money I would say.

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Definitely. I mean I knew there would probably be a performance improvement but dang. It even felt different, smoother. Can't wait to try out the proliant gen8 tonight now that sucker's REALLY gonna be fast it's got twice as much processing power (dual e52660v2's) as the t300 so it's gonna be crazy fast I bet.

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55 minutes ago, seelenapparat said:

I was with nitrado when I took over an epoch server from a friend. But I then (after 1 year) realised that the performance was going down due to me doing more scripts and stuff on my server.

I then went to rent a dedi server and was hugely impressed by the performance difference. Most noticable by the AI which shot me so fast I couldnt even react.

In the end I had 3 servers running from this one dedi box for 4 years without problems. :)

Worth the money I would say.

The thing is that ALL currently released mission systems are so performance hungry that most VM's never could handle them. No mission systems would be perfect if you want to host a server on a VM but in my opinion this is the part where most players come from because they add some variety to Epoch.

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1 hour ago, DAmNRelentless said:

The thing is that ALL currently released mission systems are so performance hungry that most VM's never could handle them. No mission systems would be perfect if you want to host a server on a VM but in my opinion this is the part where most players come from because they add some variety to Epoch.

Agree in my previous testing we easily gained 20fps and 15 server fps with 15 players on the test server when I removed the WAI/DZMS and static WAI missions for testing. WAI seems to be the biggest hit by far becuase the AI are always standing there and the server has to run calculations on every unit whether a player is within 5000m or not, just like any other "vehicle" - kinda dumb but then again I'm not smart enough to improve on WAI so I'll just hush :)

EDIT: Though my BIGGEST fps killer was a major noob mistake I've been making since I started doing this - I knew making my plots 60 x 90 and allowing 300 plot items was probably going to hurt a little but it REALLY, REALLY, REALLY trashes a server - after our next wipe I'm going back to standard plot size and 150 build item limit and keeping it that way. When we removed only half the object data during testing we saw massive fps increases. Bases, big ones, are definitely HEAVY tax, espeically when you're looking at them or your cursor is on them.

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I started my server when 1.0.6 came out, it ran on a virtualized (virtualbox) windows 7 install on my big FreeBSD server (dual xeon, 32gb ram, big raid array)

virtualized servers just don't get the performance they should, this server ran quite well on it, but sometimes would sit around 15-20fps with 2-3 players on. 

I got sick of it and built a shitty little i5 windows 7 box and its constantly 20fps higher with more players

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Objects in Epoch are custom models and have to be rendered additionally. That's why it takes a lot of performance. It's not built-in in the map so yeah.

I would work on a new mission system or atleast improve one if I had more time but I am currently working on a huge project already.

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13 minutes ago, salival said:

I started my server when 1.0.6 came out, it ran on a virtualized (virtualbox) windows 7 install on my big FreeBSD server (dual xeon, 32gb ram, big raid array)

virtualized servers just don't get the performance they should, this server ran quite well on it, but sometimes would sit around 15-20fps with 2-3 players on. 

I got sick of it and built a shitty little i5 windows 7 box and its constantly 20fps higher with more players

Yeah that's where I'm at with the VM's - never going back - I wondered if these servers would do good or not (even the proliant gen8 is already 3 years old) since they were a few years old but they seem to do just fine, and I've heard many a story of folks running servers on corei5 just fine so I really shouldn't have been so surprised I guess. I've gone ahead and opened up the slower server as a public test server for the next few days, we'll see how it does with a bunch of players on it, plus I loaded a copy of the live db so all the "hotel sized" bases are there to give us a good stress test. We'll see if any players notice it, I won't be dropping $20 for any dzlauncher server ads :D

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So far on hardware I haven't forced the cpu or thread setting and it seems to spread the work across all assigned cores fairly nicely. I assign two cores to the OS and then three for mysql and three for the server process. I'm going to be doing some tweaking but so far so good just letting it "do it's thing" lol. And yeah one server instance won't make it break a sweat, I just decided to run single instances on these for giggles because I had the spare hardware on hand. - After testing last night I'm PROB going to retire the t300 and use my recently retired core i7 daily driver because it has 6gbps I/O instead of 3gbps, and has an SSD instead of sas 15k drives. Those two details WILL make a difference in overall performance for sure.

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36 minutes ago, _Lance_ said:

Still haven't forced any thread or cpucount settings, and it's still doing pretty good at spreading out the load, this was with 17 players on at the time, no idea what it would be like with 50 on though.

pic attached

 

 

cputime10-15.jpg

What is your server fps in the server RPT though?

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20 minutes ago, salival said:

What is your server fps in the server RPT though?

Really low - I didn't think to check at the time, so what would bring up server fps? More clock speed per core? I've never seen server fps above 50, kinda weird

lol.jpg

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15 hours ago, salival said:

Arma really doesn't care for multicore, it likes high mhz cpus.

There's a lot of the AI mods that are quite intensive, it really depends on what you're running and what other background scripts you have.

You've seen my mission man :D it's chock full o mods and it's only gotten worse since then. (I kid, I actually cleaned it up and removed about 800kb of crap) Yeah the proc on that particular server has a single e5430 @ 2.66 which is kinda low clock speed per core. The other server has dual e5-2660's but they're only 2.2ghz - Anyways I think what I'm going to do is setup my recently retired daily driver core i7 2600k pc in turbo mode which should be 4ghz and see how it does as a "server" and test it out next week. The pc I'm building this weekend to replace that has an i7 7700k 4.2/4.6 turbo, that should arrive on Friday so you can bet I'll copy a server onto the new pc this weekend just to see how well it runs with the 4.6ghz clock speed, plus another reason I ordered the 7700k is it's one of the best single thread performers available right now :D - You know what I'm cooking up... LOTS of testing ahead before moving the production stuff to real hardware..

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