Do you guys plan on installing PCIE SSDs on your full machines in the near or extended future? The regular SSDs do not have enough reading capability for modern day tasks; such as, throwing four or five intensive game-servers at them. When this happens, level change speeds increase toward the thirty second marker which is less than ideal, for people paying top dollar, for latest hardware.
Personally, I find it a bit of an embarrassment that a 24 slot GMOD server (minus the reserved slots) can run a 100 tickrate, yet it takes forever to change level. Especially, in a circumstance that nothing unreasonable is being thrown at the solid state drive, beyond lots of gameservers.
PCIE Solid State Drives?
Re: PCIE Solid State Drives?
Regular SATA3 storage can do about 500 MB/s per port. Read files are cached in memory, and we aren't building machines with less than 64 GB of memory. We have not run into the I/O speed problems that you've described yet, or anything close.
If your server is taking 30 seconds to change levels, that is highly unusual, and you should investigate.
It has also been a long time since our servers have been "top dollar"
.
If your server is taking 30 seconds to change levels, that is highly unusual, and you should investigate.
It has also been a long time since our servers have been "top dollar"
.-
stickz
Re: PCIE Solid State Drives?
It is not a very good practice to run a large amount of game-servers on a single SSD. That is what my problem stems from - the idea of having one solid state drive shared with multiple servers and not using ether the PCIE interface or a raid 0/10.
The level change speeds will end up tapering off to 18s at late hours of the night, when less servers are populated. But during peak hour they fluctuate around the 30s marker. There most likely is something more than stock configurations causing this issue; however, it's disappointing that full machines that are "top dollar" compared to VDS cannot handle (within reason) what you throw at it. A logical explanation for purchasing one of these, would be for someone who wants better than a VDS, and that purpose is barely (if at all) being served with a SATA3 SSD. The solid state caches on new VDS machines, are not much slower than full machines.
I think a contributing factor to this issue, could be using demo recording features and automatically retrieving them via FTP. This is a reasonable thing to do, if someone wants to record and replay the server environment at a later date. Things are also written to text and read via FTP on a frequent basis for various reasons.
The level change speeds will end up tapering off to 18s at late hours of the night, when less servers are populated. But during peak hour they fluctuate around the 30s marker. There most likely is something more than stock configurations causing this issue; however, it's disappointing that full machines that are "top dollar" compared to VDS cannot handle (within reason) what you throw at it. A logical explanation for purchasing one of these, would be for someone who wants better than a VDS, and that purpose is barely (if at all) being served with a SATA3 SSD. The solid state caches on new VDS machines, are not much slower than full machines.
I think a contributing factor to this issue, could be using demo recording features and automatically retrieving them via FTP. This is a reasonable thing to do, if someone wants to record and replay the server environment at a later date. Things are also written to text and read via FTP on a frequent basis for various reasons.
Re: PCIE Solid State Drives?
We have not yet seen I/O speed on SATA3 SSDs be the limiting factor with our managed game servers, regardless of the number of game servers running on the machine. I don't expect to see it for quite some time, considering that game servers just don't have to read in all that much data when they are started or at map change; modern SATA3 SSDs can reliably do 80k IOPs and 500 MB/s; and the game servers have to process the data as they read it -- the speed of the processing ends up being the real limiting factor.stickz wrote:It is not a very good practice to run a large amount of game-servers on a single SSD.
I encourage you to dig deeper and contact us directly if you have a managed service that you need to be evaluated further. From your description, you may have a poorly-optimized addon. Along similar lines, I have seen some servers with addons that have written hundreds of thousands of files to disk, instead of using a central database; if an addon were to try to read those hundreds of thousands of files at map change, there would be a tremendous processing overhead.
Re: PCIE Solid State Drives?
I gotta tell you, our servers running on our Chicago box, the Intel Xeon E3-1270v5 with 1TB SSD and 64 gigs of DDR4 RAM, all servers load super fast and run flawlessly. Our Ark server is up and running in like 35 secs, and even our RUST server loads fast and runs smooth. All 4 Ark servers are 30 FPS constant and the RUST is always 500+ FPS. Still room to spare on the box.
All I can say from first hand experience is, the single SSD is very fast and has yet to be an issue.
All I can say from first hand experience is, the single SSD is very fast and has yet to be an issue.
Re: PCIE Solid State Drives?
Ark doesn't have more than 5 GB of files to be read, as well -- so that 35 seconds can't be from disk delays (it could read 70 GB in that amount of time!).
I've watched large machines with dozens of servers for a variety of games boot up and not seen them come close to maxing out their modern SSDs -- not even with all of their servers starting up at once.
I'm happy to troubleshoot further if there is a witnessed potential problem with a server that we manage. The Windows resource monitor provides good data on the disk activity, including queue length, and "iotop" (and many other tools) on Linux provide quick information on disk activity and whether there is any significant iowait.
I've watched large machines with dozens of servers for a variety of games boot up and not seen them come close to maxing out their modern SSDs -- not even with all of their servers starting up at once.
I'm happy to troubleshoot further if there is a witnessed potential problem with a server that we manage. The Windows resource monitor provides good data on the disk activity, including queue length, and "iotop" (and many other tools) on Linux provide quick information on disk activity and whether there is any significant iowait.