Yesterday I bought a new dedicated server for PlagueFest. Again. The primary reason for this new purchase is to reduce lag and to make our servers more easy to manage. The specs on this new server is really impressive coming from our old server. The new server is running a dual-CPU 6 Core Xeon (Which costs over $1000/piece), whereas our current server is a single-CPU Quad Core Xeon. That right there is at the very least a 3x increase in processing power. What does this mean for PlagueFest, you ask? This means the new server will be able to give us plenty of room for expansion, where we can host a total of 12 servers fairly easily, with a reduction in lag. Currently we are in the process of doing research and installing the best possible software configuration for the best possible server performance. We anticipate this new server will be up and running by the beginning of next week. The server IP's will remain the same. Stay tuned.
With this new server, will we be able to raise the ceiling from 62 max players? Or is the CS server software designed such that additional processor threads will not make much difference in performance?
dude have u played in our 62 slot servers... they lag like a motherfucker adding more slots would not be logical, if anythign we should make them 52 slot servers :/ the new server isn't going to make a big difference, you will see improvements in the lower slot servers
I assumed that additional processor threads really wont make much difference due to the design limitations of the CS server software. I am on ZM2 quote often and during early morning it is at peak (62/62) utilization 80% of the time, and yes it lags. Tests will need to be performed to see if the additional processor threads and the large internal L2/L3 cache of the Xenon 6 Core will make much difference. I am sure that the new motherboard provides higher bus throughput so we'll see where the ceiling will really be.
Harvey, you also have to account for how many spawn points a map has. All of the maps on our 62 slot servers are 62 player maps. We would have to redo the entire map list, or have someone add more spawn points in. Otherwise we'd have the problem of people getting stuck in each other at spawn, like has happened on a lot of old maps. I don't think anyone wants to go through that trouble.
http://plaguefest.com/index.php?/topic/4961-screw-this-lag/ While Ray was benchmarking there was a 14.2% increase in throughput per core. Although I'm not entirely sure if this was skewed because GG was running on the same core running, while JTR was running.
Thanks for the clarification. That explains why some of the good'ol maps I am familiar with like cbble is not in the map list.