We appreciate the new focus on performance. I haven't seen much of a
difference yet, but I like the possibility of future improvements.
Have you tested locking the FPS at 66, to match the tickrate, or tested
forcing it to a lowish value (100 or 250, maybe) that can be
consistently applied across-the-board on different editions of Linux and
Windows? Right now, Win2k8+ with HPET will run at 500 FPS and Win2k3
runs at 250 FPS, and Linux servers' FPS can theoretically vary based on
the hz, though hires timers are phasing that out.
More server performance metrics would be great. The most obvious one to
me would be the number of missed ticks over an interval (the last 30
seconds, for instance). Will you be removing the FPS counter from
"stats" and net_graph output? (These are where most clients see it and
will continue to look for it.)
-John
On 6/28/2011 1:16 AM, 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.
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.
Henry G.
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