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I've just transferred from some terrible server hosting company for my Ark server. The is the first VDS I've had and so far I'm super impressed. It's so useful not just for the game server, but general file transfer and other hosting options!
So down to my quick question, during the running of my Ark server we have noticed an increased ping. Now we were based in London before so naturally with this server been in Germany there will be a difference. I'm just wondering since the speed is shared (and seems to fluctuate a lot in speedtest.net), do we have an option to pay extra in order to increase the guaranteed speed at all? As this is certainly an option I would personal like to take for my server.
The 1Gbps port on your VDS is probably never saturated. The speed test servers you are using probably are. speedtest.net allows anyone with over 100Mbps of bandwidth to be a test server host, regardless of connection quality(or how much is kept available for extremely high speed connections, like NFO's).
If you do a ICMP ping to the VDS, you will probably never see an increase in ping times. What you are seeing is a ping increase as load increases for the game server and the engine. 40 players is around what I would consider the absolute max you would want for an ARK server on a VDS due to its CPU usage.
We had 40 players on just a moment ago with a CPU usage of 32%. Though I didn't know that the CPU could have an effect on ping. I assumed that was all to do with the internet connection. When I ping the server I'm getting around 30 ping but in game I'm looking more at 80-100.
jaylo1988 wrote:We had 40 players on just a moment ago with a CPU usage of 32%. Though I didn't know that the CPU could have an effect on ping. I assumed that was all to do with the internet connection. When I ping the server I'm getting around 30 ping but in game I'm looking more at 80-100.
How many cores is your VDS?
ARK's engine does around 30 updates/second, introducing a lot of extra latency. Any game that experiences high CPU load usually has a significant in-game ping increase.
Just the 4 - The cpu load seems completely fine. The RAM is certainly heading in the wrong direction, but like I say lag spikes are not really happening. The general sever ping is just poor, for a server on a gb connection I'm just a little confused as to why :/
jaylo1988 wrote:Just the 4 - The cpu load seems completely fine. The RAM is certainly heading in the wrong direction, but like I say lag spikes are not really happening. The general sever ping is just poor, for a server on a gb connection I'm just a little confused as to why :/
32% is over a core. Sounds like ARK is maxing out a thread, that's why you are seeing high pings.
jaylo1988 wrote:Would the server not spread the load over the other cores?
(Thank you for your help by the way.)
Most game servers, including ark, have a single thread that does most of the game server processing. Unfortunately the extra cores won't help you here.
This post is a bit old but I'd like to add, that your ping is based on your location, some ppl trend to think that the more bandwidth you have the less ping, but it's not like that.
Your bandwidth is like the width of a road it doesn't matter how much you increase it if you have to travel from Dallas to London it will take some time.
