ARMA 3 Server is lagging like hell!

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Blackbeard
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ARMA 3 Server is lagging like hell!

Post by Blackbeard »

Client frames are dropping INSANELY on my server. It's not my system as my system is extremely beefy. I'm getting about 15-25 FPS on the server an hour after a server restart and the CPU usage of ARMA3SERVER is only about 41% and the CPU is sitting at like 3.85Ghz and won't ever hit true 4.0Ghz. I was hoping this dedicated server would have enough room to host an 85 slot wasteland and 100 slot altis life server but so far it doesn't seem like it will be able to. Anyone have any ideas?

The dedi is the best offered by NFO fyi.

Mission: Ultimate Wasteland which is A3W Base with tons of custom code by me.
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Re: ARMA 3 Server is lagging like hell!

Post by Caliban55 »

Actually 25 fps is not bad with that high client connected numbers. As long as BI does not address the network part of the Arma 3 engine there is not much you can do.

Personally, I would not recommend to run a server with more than 60 - 75 defined player slots (and that is already very optimistic...). The rest is very mission depending, if the mission code is not optimized to handle that many players, there is not much that you can do (and neither Wasteland nor Altis life are). If you add code that is not very well integrated/written, it gets only worse.

What you can try to look in is checking if a Headless Client can help in your situation a bit, especially one running on the same machine (and other machines), as it will remove the internal bandwidth limit that the Arma 3 engine uses and offload some of the work to the HCs.
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Re: ARMA 3 Server is lagging like hell!

Post by Caliban55 »

Additional help:

If you are willing to experiment a bit, you can try Fred41's memory allocator. These are highly experimental, but it might help on high client count servers.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.p ... -gt-2GB%29

https://github.com/fred41/tbbmalloc_arma

https://github.com/fred41/GimmeMoarFrames
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Re: ARMA 3 Server is lagging like hell!

Post by Blackbeard »

Ah yes, freds memalloc. I posted in the BI dedicated server skype chat about this yesterday and even dwarden recommended it.
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Re: ARMA 3 Server is lagging like hell!

Post by Caliban55 »

I would not really expect any significant improvements, but give the combination of HC and Fred's memory allocator a try. Especially the memory allocator can be used both client and server sided.

The bottom line is, that you are running into/exceeding the limit of what a single Arma 3 server instance can handle for that particular combination of mission and number of connected clients.
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Re: ARMA 3 Server is lagging like hell!

Post by J-English »

Altis laggiest map going
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Re: ARMA 3 Server is lagging like hell!

Post by .=QUACK=.Major.Pain »

There used to be a recommendation that the best performance was in around 34 slots if I remember correctly. Increasing over that saw issues, but it also depends on what mods are added.

This was about a year ago, so hopefully they have improved the performance by now.
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Re: ARMA 3 Server is lagging like hell!

Post by Caliban55 »

It is always a bit difficult to say how well a Arma 3 server will run, there are many factors that can influence this. On top of this, there is also the client side to take into consideration. If a client has 8 year old hardware, which wasn't even top grade at that time and now sets for example the viewdistance in Arma 3 to 10.000 meters, there are bound to be problems, or worse, if someone sets this viewdistance server-sided (all encountered in the past :D ).

BI did improve the performance since release, but the engine just reaches a limit at a certain point. To take the example here, 100 players for Altis life server is pushing this limit very hard. There is a reason why Altis life in the official version only has 75 defined player slots. Someone found it a good idea to increase it to 100 (and more...) and now missions with that defined slot numbers circulate around, with all the problems that come along and players/server owners posting "Why is my server lagging/What can I do to improve my server performance".

I have mentioned this in various threads already, if a mission is not specifically designed to support a high number of connected clients for an extended duration, there is not much that can be done.
For example, I consequently followed the design from the first code of my mission, "What should be run on the server only? What on the clients? How can I minimize network traffic? Is every object created/introduced removed correctly once it is destroyed or not used anymore?"

To sum it up:
I would probably recommend to split on large server into two smaller ones, especially if it is a 100 players Arma 3 Altis life server.
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