> And let the great VM debate begin (again!) :P Doh, sorry, I don't want to go there at all!
I'm sure some folks are running game servers on VMs all day long with great results. I was mentioning what I'd seen over the past couple of years on client servers was often inadequate. Note that I only get called in to look at the machines with problems, if they are working fine I'm generally unaware of their existence. Most of the time they are woefully underpowered and woefully overloaded, such as a stock VMware setup or OpenVZ with 512MB ram trying to run 10 CoD4 servers. In a couple cases they clients claimed they were giving 100% CPU and RAM to the only VM set up on a machine and still getting stuttering, but was fine if running the game on the 'master' server. I haven't set up a testing environment myself, just relaying what I'd see from enthusiastic clients; sorry for the lack of useful details there. The OPs mention of stuttering without seeing any obvious sign of resource spikes reminded me of seeing it on the VPS machines where it seems to almost pause a server while letting another VPS get it's CPU time in. The layer between the parent and child servers (or whatever lingo your VM tech uses) is often full of voodoo (for lack of an elegant way to easily explain some pretty heavy technical stuff.) Are you running dstat and friends on the VM child or on the parent ? Run it on the parent just to see if perhaps something on it is freaking out (thereby causing a stutter across all VMs) or another VM possibly affecting the game server one. Maybe some of these VMware gurus can provide some tips for optimization, or if you have a KVM/IP or similar setup you could try John's suggestion of trying tested Xen configuration if you abandon hope with VMware. I know how bad it sucks trying to track down problems that you can't reproduce on command and typical debugging tools don't seem to help with. If all else fails, try moving operations to a dedicated box and see if things don't smooth out. ~darren _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
