Battlefield 3 Server Questions

jasonelmore
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Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by jasonelmore »

Hey, this is Jason from Slaughterhouse. I did one of these interviews with John a couple of years ago prior to the release of Bad Company 2 and published it on my site, i'd like to do it again regarding BF3. I have a few questions regarding your Battlefield 3 RDP program.

1) It has been mentioned that 64 player servers cannot run on VDS because of the technical limitations of the technology (virtual overhead), What kind of hardware can we expect a typical 64 slot server that is rented on your standard hosting package? i think it's about $97 a month looking at your order page.

2) If we ordered a Managed Dedicated Server, How many Instances are we allowed to run on that server. They are quite expensive, and the machine obviously is capable of running more than one 64 slot server.

3) What kind of Admin tool do you guys use to manage your Battlefield 3 Beta Servers? just straight rcon commands from the release protocol? your own coded rcon, or a 3rd party Rcon like ProCon, BF2CC, etc..

4) How comparable is BF3 in taxing your server hardware compared to Bad Company 2, or Red Orchestra 2.

5)Can you tell us about any of the server variables that will be available in the game. Stuff you have seen in the beta so far. Limited weapons, Vehicles Spawn Times, number of vehicles, other kinds of server variables.

Thanks a bunch for answering those questions, you guys continue to provide quality game servers which is why we've been a exclusive customer of yours for over 8 years.
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by kraze »

Hi,

If you are looking for straight John's responses only I would suggest opening a support request and asking him in there.

If not you may receive more responses from our community and other staff members, unless that is what you are also looking for?


1) It has been mentioned that 64 player servers cannot run on VDS because of the technical limitations of the technology (virtual overhead), What kind of hardware can we expect a typical 64 slot server that is rented on your standard hosting package? i think it's about $97 a month looking at your order page.
There is a good chance VDS wont be the best place to run huge slot servers that are always full, but I do not see that being a problem. Hardware depends a lot per date center and game, but BF3 will be run on new machines and top of the line hardware. If I remember correctly it will be mostly "E3-1270's". Along with our automatic load balancing script and performance guarantee, you are looking at some very smooth servers.
2) If we ordered a Managed Dedicated Server, How many Instances are we allowed to run on that server. They are quite expensive, and the machine obviously is capable of running more than one 64 slot server.
You can in theory run as many as you want, or until you hit the servers limits. There is also this which you should be aware of before ordering;
http://www.nfoservers.com/forums/viewto ... =51&t=5705
3) What kind of Admin tool do you guys use to manage your Battlefield 3 Beta Servers? just straight rcon commands from the release protocol? your own coded rcon, or a 3rd party Rcon like ProCon, BF2CC, etc..
We currently do not host Procon, but many of our users do use it by running it from there home computer. We will most likely have a custom coded in house admin daemon like we do with BC2.
4) How comparable is BF3 in taxing your server hardware compared to Bad Company 2, or Red Orchestra 2.
From what I hear BF3 is more then BC2 and right around there or maybe a little less with RO2, we have not had the chance to test 64 slot servers yet so it is still a little early to tell.
5)Can you tell us about any of the server variables that will be available in the game. Stuff you have seen in the beta so far. Limited weapons, Vehicles Spawn Times, number of vehicles, other kinds of server variables.
From playing the beta I have seen that there are no limited weapons but there is only one map and no vehicles as of yet. Spawn times are about 5-10 seconds per death. As expected the beta is really buggy but also a good insight on whats to come. So far I am loving it. As for as actual server side variables, I have spent no time with it, so I don't know.
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Edge100x
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by Edge100x »

kraze already answered these in much the same way that I would, but here are some quick answers:
jasonelmore wrote:1) It has been mentioned that 64 player servers cannot run on VDS because of the technical limitations of the technology (virtual overhead), What kind of hardware can we expect a typical 64 slot server that is rented on your standard hosting package? i think it's about $97 a month looking at your order page.
We don't yet know for certain how 64-slot servers will perform, since we haven't been allowed to test them. But, from what we have been told, and what I have seen with a 32-slot test server on a VDS, they will likely be able to run on VDSes. The virtual overhead on our specific highly-tweaked VDSes is actually not all that high, and the VDS machines are likely fast enough, in general, to handle it (all of our VDS gear is Nehalem+).

As for regular game servers, we plan to exclusively use X3470 and E3-1270 machines, due to their high individual core speeds. The 32-slot servers that we've been testing in the beta have run very well on these. BF3 servers should also run well on slower machines, but we actually don't have many slower machines on our game server network.
2) If we ordered a Managed Dedicated Server, How many Instances are we allowed to run on that server. They are quite expensive, and the machine obviously is capable of running more than one 64 slot server.
There is no limit, but keep in mind that you will need to prepay a small monthly amount for each BF3 slot you wish to run: http://www.nfoservers.com/forums/viewto ... =51&t=5705. You should also pay close attention to CPU usage as you add servers, to make sure that you don't overload the machine and cause performance problems in-game.
3) What kind of Admin tool do you guys use to manage your Battlefield 3 Beta Servers? just straight rcon commands from the release protocol? your own coded rcon, or a 3rd party Rcon like ProCon, BF2CC, etc..
The BF3 servers haven't required in-game management. For the full release, we plan to provide customers with an rcon console in the control panel and basic admin daemon, just as with BC2. Customers will also be able to run their own 3rd party programs, as with BC2.
4) How comparable is BF3 in taxing your server hardware compared to Bad Company 2, or Red Orchestra 2.
BF3 seems to be similar to BC2 for 32-slot servers. Most RO2 customers run 64-slot servers, and these are very intensive; we don't believe that 64-slot BF3 servers will be as intensive, based on what DICE is telling us.
5)Can you tell us about any of the server variables that will be available in the game. Stuff you have seen in the beta so far. Limited weapons, Vehicles Spawn Times, number of vehicles, other kinds of server variables.
I'm not allowed to talk about this topic quite yet. The rcon features are still in a state of flux during the beta, as well.
Thanks a bunch for answering those questions, you guys continue to provide quality game servers which is why we've been a exclusive customer of yours for over 8 years.
We appreciate that :)
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by IcEWoLF »

John, a per slot fee is decent, but could we request an addon feature to pay a monthly fixed amount to host ranked servers on your machine? Basically hosting as many BF3 servers with a monthly fixed pricing for Ranked server option for BF3 on your VDS server.

Ex: Pay $xxxx a month and you can host as many slots as you want on your vds/dedicated machine based on the amount of resources.

It be a pain to keep in track of multiple subscriptions for the BF3 servers.

I mean hosting a single 64 slot server on our machine is going to cost us $16 per server and that cost can go up if we are going to have multiple servers hosting on our machine depending the amount of slots.

I've seen another provider offering dedicated machines for BF3 servers but not charging extra for the slots. I think you probably know who I am talking about but I am not going to advertise their name on these forums.

This is just a suggestion.
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by Edge100x »

IcEWoLF, we considered other possibilities, but this one made the most sense, being that it was the most fair to customers. If we went for a flat fee, it would need to be based on how many servers a VDS/machine could potentially run, and would need to be quite high, which would not be fair to customers wanting to run fewer BF3 servers; it would also encourage customers to overload their machines in order to try to maximize value, hurting their reputation and ours.

We may reconsider in the future if it truly does not meet customer needs.

You can always adjust the number of slots allowed on a VDS later, if your needs change. It will just be an option on the order page.
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by TimSad »

This is some handy info posted here. Thanks guys!
                                                Our NFO Battlefield Servers!
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Edge100x
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by Edge100x »

Jason, some new performance numbers were posted today that throw 64-player servers back into the question mark category on what sorts of CPUs will be required and what consumption levels we will see -- suggesting much higher usage than the previous numbers. It seems as though we really will need to wait to test these servers ourselves to know anything concrete. They may end up requiring the very fastest machines after all.
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by jasonelmore »

Thanks for answering all of the questions. Really good info's.

Yeah, I was thinking BF3 64 slot would use more resources than RO2. The server calculates and keeps track of tons of data. In Bad Company 2, the server kept track of every single bullet and it's trajectory. Being as the Frostbite 2 engine is much more complex than the RO2 engine, i would have to think it would use more resources. However RO2 is somewhat of a sim, so i can see similar data being logged and calculated on their end as well.

BF3 does however have destruction, and typically more stuff that can blow up that RO2. Multiply that by 64 players cooking grenades, shooting rockets, etc... things can get hairy really quick.

I was lucky enough to play Caspian Border for 2 days before the servers got shut down, and you could really tell which server providers were skimping out on the hardware. MyIS servers were complete garbage and could not handle 64. they were running 64, but it was unplayable.

I remember a bunch of the MultiPlay servers had to scale down from 64 slot, to 48 slot.

Also, i dunno if this was a requirement from DICE, but it seemed the servers were automatically restarting when they reached XXXX amount of memory usage. Sometimes you could go 1 round and it would restart/crash, and sometimes you could go 3-5 rounds without a server restart/crash. I think it was a restart tho, because it would always do it at the same exact time, at the end of the round during the scoreboard and ribbon giveaway. That's just my theory anyways.

I think your right in the 32 player department, it's about the same as BC2. Caspian border was definitely more buggy than Metro.

Also if there is a memory leak due to bugs in the bf3 server software, i would have to think it would increase exponentially with the addition of more slots.

In the end of the day, i just hope it doesn't constantly crash like BC2 servers did. We had our community fill our bc2 servers every-night, only for them to crash after a couple of maps. I remember those days and they were not a good memory were they john. lol, oh the support tickets you guys got. everyone got mad, pointed fingers, and in the end, it came down to a game that had a very buggy release.

Thanks again, and keep us updated when you find out more.

Jason E.
Slaughterhouse

EDIT: Sweet you guys added "Edit Post" to the forum, about time!
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by jasonelmore »

Looks like DICE has released the Caspian Border Server files to all the RSP's.

How long until yours are up? a lot of these servers are lagging like crazy, probably on weak hardware.
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by Edge100x »

I converted a couple of servers at each location to Caspian now.

CPU-usage-wise, full 64-slot servers seem to be using about 60-85% of a single E3-1270 processor core. I am still waiting on the VDS-based test server ("US NFOservers.com DAL #09") to fill up in order to see its performance.
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by Colt »

6 of us are on Den 02. very smooth.
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by Colt »

edit....6 of us..clan are on. The server is full.
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by wyseguy79 »

Edge100x wrote:I converted a couple of servers at each location to Caspian now.

CPU-usage-wise, full 64-slot servers seem to be using about 60-85% of a single E3-1270 processor core. I am still waiting on the VDS-based test server ("US NFOservers.com DAL #09") to fill up in order to see its performance.
Can't wait to see the results for the VDS based server, thanks for the info!
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by IcEWoLF »

Looking forward to it.
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Re: Battlefield 3 Server Questions

Post by marrr »

Edge100x wrote:I converted a couple of servers at each location to Caspian now.

CPU-usage-wise, full 64-slot servers seem to be using about 60-85% of a single E3-1270 processor core. I am still waiting on the VDS-based test server ("US NFOservers.com DAL #09") to fill up in order to see its performance.
so the 1270 can only handle 4-64 player servers?
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