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We currently have a server through you guys and have toyed with the idea of upgrading over the last few months but haven't pulled the trigger yet. Here is our server spec from you guys.
Over the last few weeks we have not been getting the performance out of the server that we were getting in early December. Before mid-December (around the 10th-15th) we started noticing massive hardware usage spikes in both CPU and HDD usage.
We were using "symlinks" to put our mods on our C: (HDD) and run the game off the SSD (D:); this worked beautifully up until the time frame mentioned above. This was something that we had done since starting the server back in August of 2017. Our most recent milsim mission was pushing out 30-45fps server side without any hiccups with 15-20 players testing the mission in late November into early December and running for 24+ hours without any major problems. Then at the time frame mentioned above it all went to crap. Maybe we could run for 5-7 hours with 15-20+ players and sometimes we could only run for 1-3 hours before server frames went into the toilet; and sometimes not even that long.
Is there anything that would help this? Could a complete reinstall of Windows Server2016 or a change to a new server configuration alleviate the issues? Would a wipe of the D: (SSD) without reinstalling the server files be helpful?
This is uncharted territory for us for sure and we would love a complimentary upgrade to a faster machine at the lower per month cost since we are such a long time customer.... If you guys did that for us it would make us VERY HAPPY!
It should not make a difference if you use a HDD or a SSD for your ArmA 3 server, unless you have mods that constantly write to/read from disk (which would be rather strange). An SSD has a bigger impact on client systems, where textures have to be loaded, etc. .
The latest ArmA 3 update could have an effect on the performance of your mods, you would have to check wich mods were affected by the update. If if come to checking the performance of a server, using a (heavily modded) server/mission is usually a bad idea, better would be to monitor a vanilla ArmA 3 installation over severall hours (24 hours), with players on it.
If it comes to missions, you should make sure that you do not have any endless looping scripts, errors, etc running, or using outdated mods. You can use the ArmA 3 server profiling branch to check for this.
Yeah I should have said that we tend to run some test missions that are just vanilla with ALiVE, ACE and CBA for testing purposes. We thenl add in one additional mod at a time to see what breaks and what impacts the overall performance.
As for the profiling branch we actually stopped using that because we didn't really see a difference in the "stable" vs "profiling" for the server. Clients noticed a difference on their ends but there was no difference server side.
Lots of people complain about the ALiVE mod "breaking" things but I have found it to be relatively stable or at least as stable as Arma would allow it to be with the broken aspects of the ancient RV engine that it runs on.
With this last mission; I had 34-36 mods running but had meticulously rebuilt this mission over the last year and tested each mod extensively in our base mod test setup and added one script or mod at a time to the structure and it was working flawlessly.
When I say we never had under 30fps on the server side in the full mission during the final test phase; its not a boast at all. This mission was humming like a top; right up until we updated with a Windows update and the Arma update. Even then I went back to testing on the mission to ensure nothing was broken and it still worked as expected.
I am thinking that a complete wipe and reinstall of Arma might be the best option overall....thoughts?
The profiling branch isn't for a productive enviroment, it is used to determine where the resources go in a mission and where bottlenecks are. It requires an active action when running the profiling builds.
Before you start with wiping and reinstalling everything, you might want to try the legacy ArmA 3 build (Arma3Legacy184) and check if the performance is related to the 1.86 build.
You can also use Windows own Peformance Monitor (enter perf in the Windows search box) to set up various performance monitors and help to identify what is responsible for the high I/O, or CPU demands. I don't think that this is related to Windows, as you would see a performance impact in general then. What you described is something happening during the mission, where it runs fine for some time and after a certain condition is active, you notice a detrimental performance effect.
If you guys did that for us it would make us VERY HAPPY! 
