Will SSD upgrade help eliminate lag spike due to B3 database

[Numenius]

Dear NFO Servers,

First off, you guys rock! Never been happier with a host. Very well thought-out, smooth, professional experience I've been having here. Thank you.

Second, I have read the knowledge base on performance. Great guide.

My configuration:
Dual-core VDS running Win2008, to which I installed:
WAMP (MySQL, php, Apache)
UrbanTerror dedicated server
B3 Bot with xlrstats and a few other less-demanding plugins
Drupal OpenScholar (yeah, I mix business with pleasure)

My problem:
Occasionally the server has a lag spike even enough to generate Connection Interruption (CI) on all clients: description fits what you list as Cause: Plugins on the performance knowledge base. I ran Remote Desktop in one window, and an UrT client in another to diagnose the cause. Resource Monitor correlates the CI spike with sharp increase in disk writes as Cause:Plugins suggests is a frequent cause.

CPU util stays very low throughout this: 20% across both cores. Memory util somewhere around 1GB of my 2GB total: has memory to spare.

So diskwrites due to B3 are likely the cause. But plugins aren't a bug! They just need adequate resources.

My question is:
So how do I overcome this limitation? Will moving MySQL / WAMP / B3 files to an SSD drive help, or is there a better way? I've played on a number of servers that run B3 smoothly with 32, even 64 clients. Suggestions?

Also, because I'm lazy, is there a way to just move the whole image of my drive to SSD if SSD is the solution? It's only like 20 GB total.

With appreciation,

oK|Numenius
Package #137490

[kraze]

If you were able to peg down and see that the lag spikes are definitely caused by sudden disk writes, then yes an SSD would definitely help.

However you should try doing some testing just to be sure. Such as disabling plugins or disabling the B3 bot to see if that stops the lag or CI's.

[Edge100x]

An SSD could certainly help with disk read/write delays. If you know the file(s) that are causing the delay, you could potentially also just move those specific ones to the SSD (using a softlink or a configuration variable in the application).

[.=QUACK=.Major.Pain]

It's that BF3 runs like crap on a VDS from what I have seen.
We had one with just a BF3 server installed and nothing else.
Procon disabled completely and still consistantly lagged.

Moved to just a BF3 game server with Procon, B3, gameME and no lag at all.
gameME was switched for rconNET and still no lag.

Been reading many complaints about it so we switched and are happier with out it.

[Numenius]

Thanks, Kraze and Edge100x. I disabled xlrstats plugin only and saw significant decrease in CI / lag spike, but not to zero. Since the server is new, we only get intermittent decent traffic, but it ran with only 6-7 spikes over two hours tonight with xlrstats off with 15 players, 6 bots. Only two spikes were big enough to generate CIs, as opposed to all of them doing it previously with xlrstats on, and we got plenty more spikes. I will keep watching it over the next couple of days to corroborate with more data.

I'm just learning server config, so if I wanted to move the whole WAMP directory to SSD volume, I'd just move it (from C:\wamp to D:\wamp) and then mklink /d c:\wamp d:\wamp and the rest of the programs never notice the difference? That would be sweet.

Total WAMP dir is only 2 GB, so I should have plenty of room to spare on a 5GB SSD add-on.

If the above sounds good to you, I will watch for a few days, verify, then proceed with upgrade. OK?

Best,

Numenius

[Edge100x]

Pain, he's not running BF3. We do have quite a few customers running BF3 servers on VDSes, though, and it seems to do just fine as long as the servers are 48-slot or below.

Numenius, I believe that will work, yes. Also, I recommend that you run the game server with "above normal" or "high" CPU priority, in case micro CPU spikes are causing you trouble. You might try turning off logging on the game server as a test, as well (that should be the only usage of the disk by the game server itself during actual gameplay).

[Numenius]

I performed the SSD upgrade, and things seem to be running MUCH better even with xlrstats enabled. The acid test will be this weekend when things get busy. Thanks for the advice!

The symbolic linking worked painlessly in two commands as described above for B3/xlrstats/gameserver. The only things I had to change were several settings in apache to handle the fact that the physical location of files had changed from c:\ to f:\ In particular .htaccess needs tweaking in a few places and php.ini. But I worked that out after a day of reading up and twiddling.

I mention this in case anyone else is thinking of a similar upgrade, or better still, just go with the SSD from the start.

[Edge100x]

I'm glad to hear that it's working well for you so far!

[Numenius]

Just to confirm: The SSD nailed the problem. Server has been running smooth as silk with even more people and plugins than ever before. Happiness!

[Edge100x]

That's good, but it does make me a little worried about the disk activity on your physical machine potentially being extremely high (another customer may be heavily using the disk). Please let me know about this directly in a support request/email, and I'll investigate that in more depth; I may need to suggest to that customer that he also consider an SSD.