Recommendations for better performance

[smelting 6]

Hi all,

I recently built a custom server for exile to hopefully be able to run 80+ slots with lots of AI and zombies. I've had the server about a quarter full (around 20 players) and I started to notice a slight dip in fps. I was wondering if there was anything I could do without reducing AI anymore.

Here are the specs:

i-7 4790k  -> 4.0Ghz base ... Turbo -> 4.4Ghz

16gb cosair ram -> 1600MHz ...fastest motherboard supports

128gb SSD -->  93,000 IOPS read 

ASRock E3C226D2I Mini ITX Server Motherboard

Ubuntu 14.03

Mysql 5.7 hosted on the same machine.

Gigabit up/down link

 

I don't have the option to overclock, and I wouldn't even if the server board could for stability issues. I run two headless clients for the zombies.  Are there any options to offload some of the work to clients/other server threads?

 

[TPGDagger 51]

FPS is hugely player dependent. I run 40-50 at 10-20 people. Get it to 70 and you'll be lucky to maintain 12. You can squeeze more out with headless clients and a solid rig and the like, but Linux I have heard performs actually worse than Windows.

 

Server FPS is not the same as client FPS keep in mind as well. It is normal for the server to run at a much lower FPS. I recommend aggressive cleanup scripts on buildings and vehicles, limiting the AI to acceptable amounts (Zombies will kill it if you have them spawning dynamically and you don't have it limited to like 50)

 

Your best bet is to get the thing maxed in player pop and see what the gameplay is like. Do the AI chug? Huge delays in scripts? Then work on remedying these problems. 

 

As well, SSD's help but I've ran my 70 man on a SSD and on a RAID 1 SATA3 setup and not had any difference whatsoever. 

 

CPU helps a ton, but so long as the thing isn't 100% you'll find that the biggest limiting piece here is always, by far, the engine itself.

 

Launch with -loadmissiontomemory in startup by the way, I noticed a gain in serverside FPS (around 10-15%) when I made this change. This was suggested by @MGTDB I think, so credit goes to him.

Edited January 25, 2016 by TPGDagger

[second_coming 836]

from everything I've read, Arma server runs better on Windows over Linux.

[smelting 6]

I feel like linux might be scewed because people run them on VMs or containers. Someone should test it and finalize the discussion.

[Torndeco 233]

Nope armaserver on linux is screwed by BIS.
I would be surprised if you had better performance running it under wine or a VM running windows OS.

It just get enough support to work and even then they have a habit of leaving the Linux HC broken for months till they around to fixing it.

Edited January 25, 2016 by Torndeco

[DeathInc 17]

On 1/25/2016 at 11:53 AM, TPGDagger said:

FPS is hugely player dependent. I run 40-50 at 10-20 people. Get it to 70 and you'll be lucky to maintain 12. You can squeeze more out with headless clients and a solid rig and the like, but Linux I have heard performs actually worse than Windows.

 

Server FPS is not the same as client FPS keep in mind as well. It is normal for the server to run at a much lower FPS. I recommend aggressive cleanup scripts on buildings and vehicles, limiting the AI to acceptable amounts (Zombies will kill it if you have them spawning dynamically and you don't have it limited to like 50)

 

Your best bet is to get the thing maxed in player pop and see what the gameplay is like. Do the AI chug? Huge delays in scripts? Then work on remedying these problems. 

 

As well, SSD's help but I've ran my 70 man on a SSD and on a RAID 1 SATA3 setup and not had any difference whatsoever. 

 

CPU helps a ton, but so long as the thing isn't 100% you'll find that the biggest limiting piece here is always, by far, the engine itself.

 

Launch with -loadmissiontomemory in startup by the way, I noticed a gain in serverside FPS (around 10-15%) when I made this change. This was suggested by @MGTDB I think, so credit goes to him.

I suggest moving your DB from MySQL to MariaDB. MariaDB is a binary drop in replacement for MySQL and is highly optimized. It may help you with your DB queries. Also, start using Headless Clients. I ran a Fedora 23 Wasteland Server with 2 HCs and had no issues. The server had ACE3 and ALiVE running too so the AI was no issue.