Reducing latency and increasing smoothness of the game serve

[HighDive]

Hello,

I recently (1 month ago) started hiring a VPS at NFOServers and I have to say I am quite pleased with the results. Good support and of course, you pretty much get what's promised. As far I can see, the VPS packages got everything needed to fire up those game servers and have a blast!

It is the first VPS I ever managed and it was quite 'overwhelming' at first. At this point, things start to become increasingly clear and I feel it is time to move on to the more important stuff: increasing the experience of the users using the game servers I am hosting.

As you will most likely know, there are 2 major factors at play here: server stability/smoothness and connection latency (and perhaps others, but these are the ones I'm concerned about at this point ).

I was wondering if you guys would have any tips for me, so that I could further reduce the pings, even if it was by just one ms (Tribes really is that sensitive that say 10ms can make a big difference)? The reason I'm asking this is, because I have just used some "TCP optimizing" tool, which changed some registry values, which caused the pings to drop from 4 to 10 ms by most players connected to my game servers. I mean, if such a program can do that, you can't tell me that it's impossible to optimize these or other settings even further, having the specifications the VPS' have here. So, do you guys know of any tips or tricks, programs or other things that could further reduce the latency?

Secondly, we got the server stability/smoothness. Today, I have upgraded to the 3-core VPS package, coming from the 2-core VPS package. The result was that people only felt a minor difference, while the servers still "stutter" every now and then. I have set high priority to all server processes through the task manager, but I am pretty clueless on how to further send system resources that way. If any of you guys could be able to and want to help, that'd be, greatly appreciated by the entire Tribes Vengeance community!

Important details:
Running 4 Tribes Vengeance game servers
3-core VPS package
maximum of 30 connections at any time

Thanks a lot in advance!

HighDive

[soja]

In general, keeping your resource usage low is the best way to allow the best performance. What is your CPU/RAM usage like? Can you observe any disk intensive processes(such as your game servers) that would benefit from running on a SSD?

Usually games use UDP(with a few exceptions), so I am surprised to see a "TCP optimization tool" make any real difference. They usually involve making windows send packets more frequently, which is less efficient, but faster(if I remember correctly).