Dedicated Server - How To Improve Server "FPS"

[ahawksfan]

I am hoping to get some assistance to improve the performance of our dedicated on premise server.  Running strictly vanilla with these initial parameters:

 

2022-01-31T19:27:25 2.003 INF Version: Alpha 20 (b238) Compatibility Version: Alpha 20, Build: Windows 64 Bit
2022-01-31T19:27:25 2.004 INF System information:
2022-01-31T19:27:25 2.005 INF    OS: Windows 10  (10.0.18363) 64bit
2022-01-31T19:27:25 2.006 INF    CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-4650 0 @ 2.70GHz (cores: 6)
2022-01-31T19:27:25 2.007 INF    RAM: 6065 MB
2022-01-31T19:27:25 2.007 INF    GPU: Null Device (128 MB)
2022-01-31T19:27:25 2.011 INF    Graphics API: NULL 1.0 [1.0] (shader level 5.0)

 

The performance I am speaking about is the FPS (not client but server value).  {editorial - someone should really change that term from FPS so it isn't mistaken for Frames Per Second - maybe ZIS for Zed Instructions per Second}  When running with very few zombies in the chunk it typically will be between 20-30 (the ideal area).  Naturally, with more Zombies it drops, and this is regardless if we double the CPU or RAM on the server.

 

I should have added during the stuttering the CPU utilization never exceeds 30%, RAM usage never climbs over 50% and disk utilization never hits more than 2%.  If resources like CPU/RAM/DISK are the bottleneck then increasing them should help.  I doubled all the resources (except disk speed) and no change in performance.

 

So in short, if we have a poor "FPS" value what can we do to improve it to prevent Zombie stuttering?  Recent performance log report attached here:

 

https://pastebin.com/cj87ecax

 

Thanks for your time in advance!

Edited February 3, 2022 by ahawksfan (see edit history)

[Beelzybub]

Dunno if this is an issue, but it looks like things were not cleaned up properly from previous versions.

2022-01-31T19:27:25 2.012 INF Last played version: Alpha 18.1

 

How are you limiting the cores to 6? Is it a VM? Or Affinity?

I think more memory would help, 6Gb isn't even min spec. and letting all 8 cores/16 threads have at it would help.

Also running on an nvme or ssd could help if you are not already.

[ahawksfan]

9 minutes ago, Beelzybub said:

Dunno if this is an issue, but it looks like things were not cleaned up properly from previous versions.

2022-01-31T19:27:25 2.012 INF Last played version: Alpha 18.1

 

How are you limiting the cores to 6? Is it a VM? Or Affinity?

I think more memory would help, 6Gb isn't even min spec. and letting all 8 cores/16 threads have at it would help.

Also running on an nvme or ssd could help if you are not already.

Thanks for the reply!

 

It is a VM that has the potential to grab more RAM if it needs it.  VM previously had 18.1 on it but I deleted the entire folder before install.

 

I should have added during the stuttering the CPU utilization never exceeds 30%, RAM usage never climbs over 50% and disk utilization never hits more than 2%.  If resources like CPU/RAM/DISK are the bottleneck then increasing them should help.  I doubled all the resources (except disk speed) and no change in performance.

 

Hopefully we can get a better idea what is happening in that FPS cycle and fix the bottle neck.

[SylenThunder]

Also note that 20-30 isn't the ideal area for server FPS.

 

a14-a19 it was 30-40 is idea. Over 40 is wasted CPU cycles, under 25 is where you'll start to see things lagging out. (a14 is an estimate, might have been ideal since a10, but I can't recall offhand that far back atm.)

a20 ideal is more like 40-50FPS, and I've had servers running up to 53FPS under peak performance. 30-40 still seems to be "ok" territory as long as you're within supported values. Below 30 and you'll start to see a lot of lag/latency.

 

Oh, and 6GB RAM is below min spec. Pagefile/Swap needs to be a minimum of 8GB as well. CPU is a bit on the low-end in terms of base clock speed, doesn't multithread well, and has low memory bandwidth. The saving grace for you would be to have a decent storage array, but given the rest of the lineup, I'm inclined to think it's something like a 10k SAS drive at best. Running a VM is just adding another layer of slow, and you're already working with Windows.

 

Final note, FPS for server clock cycles is probably older than the FPS term for monitors and games. It's used in another computing task that pre-dates gaming, and in networking as well. Kind of like "Lag" was primarily used to describe high network latency, and over the past 20 years has been used by gamers to describe low FPS or a bottlenecked system.

[Beelzybub]

39 minutes ago, ahawksfan said:

VM previously had 18.1 on it but I deleted the entire folder before install.

Did you delete the saves folder and settings? Something didn't get cleaned.

 

How are you getting like 70 zombies on there at once with one player and default set to 8? I don't think your hardware can support that many at once and still play nice.

[ahawksfan]

Going to retest with a 16GB of RAM and PageFile along with 12 processors to see if I get any change in results.  One note I am seeing is with one processor the usage is almost 90% but the other current 5 it is barely 20%.  Can anyone confirm or deny that 7d2d dedicated server code  is primarily single threaded?  If that is the case then a faster clock cycle processor might be a better solution.

[SylenThunder]

12 hours ago, ahawksfan said:

Going to retest with a 16GB of RAM and PageFile along with 12 processors to see if I get any change in results.  One note I am seeing is with one processor the usage is almost 90% but the other current 5 it is barely 20%.  Can anyone confirm or deny that 7d2d dedicated server code  is primarily single threaded?  If that is the case then a faster clock cycle processor might be a better solution.

It is primarily single threaded, but sets a lot of smaller worker jobs on all of the other available threads. Yes core clock speed will make a big difference in performance.