> I have a hard time believing that writing tiny files affects
'performance'
Under the scenario I described, it occurs. Physical media can only
handle a certain number of IOPs, and with heavy disk access forcing the
write cache to fill and the OS to suspend further writes, every
transaction has to wait extra time. If you're curious to know more,
check out the documentation on vm.dirty_ratio for Linux (though I mostly
see this happen on Windows servers).
> I have no idea what baseline performance is in the context of a game
server.
The baseline performance in that case would be no background disk access.
> Writing anything to disk from cache takes a hit anyways, ie: TLB
hits/misses, etc.
I'm not talking about nanosecond-level differences when I talk about
delays from disk writes, as TLB hits/misses would cause. I'm talking
about multiple-millisecond delays. The typical SATA drive has on the
order of a ~10ms latency, and having to wait on a log write causes
noticeable "spikes"/delays.
> Do you know where the 'FPS' gets it's number from?
This was previously discussed.
> The point I am trying to make here is that with all the info you
provided above, it's still speculation.
By asking that the FPS number be removed from "stats" output, you
seem to be indicating that it is not a valid measure of performance.
I don't believe that is the case.
Again, is debatable. For too long there have been many many people
(including myself at one point) that claim/claimed high FPS was great
and did this and that. Well, after reverse engineering, I have come to
the conclusion that FPS only drives the engines time for things like
snaps (not sure what the term is for VALVe games, snaps are quake 3
terms) and a few other things..
It certainly is debateable, as we're debating it :). We seem to be in
agreement that a realized tickrate number would be much more useful to
have, though.
> I guess all and all, people only complain about the FPS of a server
because they don't realize most things in a game are estimated due to
general relativity, interpolation/exterp, prediction, etc.
People (well, the ones trying to actually troubleshoot -- many others
just blindly complain about registration) are looking for ways to
measure performance in hard terms. There aren't too many of them. In my
experience, FPS does have some correlation with server performance (as
noticed through gameplay and client net_graph readouts), although not
always as closely as some believe.
-John
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