At 08:25 PM 4/15/2007 -0700, Alfred fesses up:
>Right now all the SMP work revolves around client side optimisations, it
>is unclear what benefits can be found on the server.
At present we're stuck at 2.6Ghz a core, so to my way of thinking if
the game requires a 3Ghz or 3.5Ghz CPU to sustain performance then the options
are to 1) put SMP support in the engine so it can get an effective 2*2.6GHz to
work with, 2) drop the number of players and tick rate to compensate, or 3)
forget about purchasing quad-core boxes and dedicate a Pentium D at 3.8Ghz with
the 1024MHz FSB and eat the costs of the extra hardware.
I doubt we'll see this in CS:S any time soon, but in DoD:S the mappers
seem to want to put everything from Normandy to the Maginot Line in one map,
and you know better than most how larger maps and the greater number of
entities to calculate around increase load. And users scale in a logarithmic
manner.
Granted, Valve's bread and butter is CS:S, so I wouldn't expect DoD:S
alone to prompt this. Granted also, DoD:S has sort of caused its own problem
in this regard and it's not Valve's obligation to fix it. This is still going
to become a problem that current hardware cannot address, if not with CS:S then
perhaps with TF2 when the mappers get crazy or when we try to run 32-player
servers of Deathmatch four months from now.
To me, my choices are coming down to money. If SMP support is four
months from now I can slide a bit, maybe move my DoD:S server to a box that
only handles that game and maybe a web service, and I can leave my CS:S servers
on dual-core or quad-core machines and consolidate them a bit. If SMP support
is a year away on the server side, and a 2.6Ghz core isn't cutting it, either I
need to buy faster single-core processors and dedicated boxes and adjust my
budget, or I need to tell my folks that a 32-player box at 100 tick isn't
feasable for that game on today's hardware.
Which reminds me, we're fast approaching the time where there needs to
be a decent benchmark tool for servers. Something that can simulate 32 users
or 24 users and just put a load on the box so we can tell if we're hitting the
limits of CPU, memory, disk, network, etc... before promising the customer a
Great Gaming Experience. I'm afraid that "Sorry, the custom map you loaded is
at fault" or "try it without any mods" isn't going to be an adequate defense in
the near future. Such a tool might be justified in development time mainly by
documenting limitations and thus setting priorities in development of the
server code.
- Dan
* Dan Sorenson DoD #1066 A.H.M.C. #35 [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* Vikings? There ain't no vikings here. Just us honest farmers. *
* The town was burning, the villagers were dead. They didn't need *
* those sheep anyway. That's our story and we're sticking to it. *
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