At 04:16 AM 6/28/2011, Henry Goffin wrote:
Hi all -
Free to Play brought a huge influx of new users to Team Fortress. To
help server counts scale up to match the demand, we are reworking
the dedicated server for performance. We want to improve player
responsiveness as well as to reduce CPU usage so that hosts can run
more servers per physical server.
Some of those changes addressing CPU usage went out last night.
Server operators should see a big decrease in CPU load and can
potentially run more instances per physical box now. However, a side
effect that many of you have noticed is that server FPS has an
effective cap of 500 instead of the previous 1000, or possibly even
lower than 500 depending on your Linux kernel HZ setting. This
should not have a noticeable impact on gameplay as the tick rate is
still locked (well, mostly locked) at 66 updates per second and the
frames that are being dropped are "empty" frames that do not
actually run a server tick.
We're going to address this further in another set of performance
improvements. Sorry for the temporary confusion, but we wanted to
get these CPU load reduction changes out quickly to help with the
Free to Play user crush.
How about some native 64bit binaries? Using shared objects clobbers
the ebx register on 32bit.
Longer term, we want to move away from FPS as a measure of
performance and instead show actual load and responsiveness
(jitter/latency) statistics. The difference between a tick and a
frame is complicated, and fps_max sometimes affects performance in
counter-intuitive ways. We would like to retire fps_max for servers
and replace it with a more obvious server performance setting. We'll
give you all a heads up before we do so.
Please also add bounds checking to the usleep call prevent fictitious
values from inflating the server's FPS, causing idiots to sell super
high FPS that does nothing. I have some code if you want to
demonstrate this behavior.
<gary at summit-servers dot com | gary at DragonflyBSD dot org>
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~gary
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