Load Balancing

[.=QUACK=.Major.Pain]

Is it difficult to setup load balancing for gameservers on a dedi server, or is this something a customer shouldn't do and leave it to the host?

[Edge100x]

On a single machine, you should let the OS handle it unless you have a very small list of servers that you are configuring manually such that each receives its own core. I have generally found that trying to load-balance in real-time with scripts is complicated and does not have a better result than what the OS does, most of the time.

[.=QUACK=.Major.Pain]

I have 12 servers at the moment with about 5 turned off and only turned on if we want to play on them.

Most are Dayz servers, as well as 2 Procon, 2 L4D2, and TS3.

Just wondering because I notice that on 8 cores, I see 4 and 5 seem to always be somewhat higher than all the others. Sometimes by a lot.

Servers run great, but wasn't sure if this is something that needed attention.

Thanks for the feedback.

[rustydusty1717]

Sad that lots of games, both client and server side can't benefit from today's multicore chips. Try running a HL1 on a 6 core machine, it's useless. Only runs on one single core.

[soja]

Since the servers run on a single core(most of them), if a server is full/highly loaded it will take up 100% of 1 core, instead of spreading it out. That might explain what you are seeing.

[.=QUACK=.Major.Pain]

Makes sense.

All dayz servers are started with the following in the command line:
-cpuCount=2 -exThreads=1 -maxMem=2048

Guessing with each using 2 cores, if I read that right, there is probably overlapping of servers on some cores causing some to be higher.

[Edge100x]

Is anything binding them to certain cores on the system? I recommend checking on this by looking at one of the processes through the task manager.

[TimeX]

I could be wrong, but what I've noticed in the past is that setting something like -cpuCount=2 -exThreads=1 will cause it to still only use one CPU, since there is only one thread, while setting both to 2 should allow it to spread out.

[.=QUACK=.Major.Pain]

So your saying both at 2 may improve performance and balance out the cores?

[kraze]

There is a pretty good topic on the DayZ forums that explain how those work;
http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/top ... rformance/

-exThreads actually works in a different way then what most would think. Give that guide a good once over, it should really help.

However, some of the stuff listed in that guide would not be smart to follow, so be sure to keep backups of whatever you change.

[rustydusty1717]

I don't think a parameter is really going to change a whole lot regarding cores. If the game is single threaded, or even lightly multithreaded, it will only benefit from 1-2 cores. Even BF3 will only benefit from 2 full cores I believe. Sad, considered the latest xeon chips are 6+ cores and 6 threads, per CPU. Most poweredge machines are dual CPU as well. So, 12 cores, 12 threads in reality, if not more.

[TimeX]

That is true for most games, but Arma2 is the one game I have seen make use of multiple cores when configured correctly. Some of us have seen servers use up 3 cores and partial use on a 4th, maybe even more. It is indeed a shame that some of these newer, power-hungry games can't make the same use of multiple cores.

[rustydusty1717]

Wow, there's a service side game that will support more than 2 cores! It is extremely sad, and frustrating for admins to run the best performing game servers on top of the line hardware, yet the software won't support the hardware to it's fullest.

[kraze]

Wow, there's a service side game that will support more than 2 cores! It is extremely sad, and frustrating for admins to run the best performing game servers on top of the line hardware, yet the software won't support the hardware to it's fullest.

I don't think developers will start adding official support for multiple cores anytime soon :/

Only way around it is to use extremely high quality machines and not overload them.

[rustydusty1717]

That's the problem, machines are going with more cores, not necessarily higher core speeds. They better pick up their software/hardware integration. Everything besides games is realizing their software needs to be heavy multi-threaded, so they will continue to benefit from the latest chips with more cores.