I have little to no issues on my VPS's. However, you have to buy smart
and not buy for price. Their are many bad VPS providers. There are also
a ton of good ones. A little more pricey but great service is
linode.com.
On 2012-02-22 11:22, dan wrote:
On 22/02/2012 18:45, Michael Johansen wrote:
VPS? Don't do it man, you're going to have SO much trouble with it.
Unstable FPS, lagspikes (because the CPU is shared, and if some
customer uses more CPU, it's gonna lag) and all sorts of other
bullshit you don't want.
To be fair it's 6 of 1 and half a dozen of the other.
If you've got a dedicated server running nothing other than one
instance of a TF2 server, then you're incredibly fortunate and maybe
you won't have to share the cpu.
Otherwise, usually, the machine your server is on, whether it's a
VPS or not, will be shared in some way with other people.
e.g If you google 'tf2 servers' and find one of these '39p a slot!'
folk you will get a TF2 server running on a machine that you share
with other customers of that vendor. If this works then why shouldn't
a VPS? OTOH, if it doesn't work, how are they getting away with it?
That means you share the cpu and all the other resources on the
machine, pretty much whatever option you pick. If you've ever played
on Valve's fra servers at weekends when nigh on every instance is
full
you'll see the same downside you are describing. The machines seem to
be struggling to run that many instances. Midweek, or late at night,
when most of the instances are empty, things are much better.
FPS is pretty moot now with TF2. In fact that update made a big
difference to the CPU required ime.
I still wouldn't advise anyone to use a VPS if they either can afford
not to and/or have a working option already and if they just want a
TF2 server (as opposed to having a linux box on the internet that you
can use for a number of things, including running TF2) But it's a
fallacy to claim it doesn't work because you're sharing things - most
of the cost-effective ways to run a TF2 server will share machine
resources.
The type of virtualisation (openvz, Xen PV etc) in use is probably
key to your experience. My VPS uses Xen PV and other people using the
machine doesn't impact it in the way some virt options can. I think
there's a tendency for VPS purchasers to buy the cheapest option they
can find and then jump ship the moment another cheaper offer appears
(and then act peeved that it isn't like a dedicated server - some of
the people that buy VPS are certifiable). I think many VPS vendors
basically cater to this solely price-focussed business model too.
Giving the whole thing a far worse name than it deserves.
I've run minecraft, TF2 and L4D 2 on it, and it works. If anything
hlds works better because minecraft has ridiculous ram requirements.
But, the price tiers VPS are sold on usually only specify ram, HD
space and bandwidth - and these aren't really the issue for Tf2. They
are quite trivial to get enough of (I don't think I've ever used 10%
of the bandwidth I get allocated per month). CPU is less obvious in
most VPS adverts. /proc/cpuinfo for my VPS suggests it has a 2.66ghz
quadcore, but digging deep in my providers website I found supposedly
the tier level I get gives me equiv of 1.2ghz. Probably not enough.
Trouble is to raise that I'd end up with silly amounts of ram and HD
space I wouldn't use (and a much bigger bill)
So yeah, it's not perfect. But if you've got a VPS then running TF2
on it does work and it's definitely a fallacy to say "the cpu is
shared", given that this is most likely going to be the case whatever
other alternatives you have - at least similarly priced ones. We
can't
all afford one dedicated server per tf2 instance can we?
--
-- Cameron Munroe
http://www.cameronmunroe.com/
http://www.munroenet.com/
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