In 2001 there was an faq that stated that hlds did not support smp
(symmetric multi-processing), but that valve was considering it. I don't
know what happened to this old faq, I wasn't able to find a copy of it.
I pretty sure Valve never got around to doing anything about this, since
to reverse engineer multicore support into a program like hlds would be
a huge amount of work and would probably result in a nasty hair-ball of
code unless you re-engineered the entire source base, and that would
have been way more work than it was worth.
June 2003 our good friend Alfred Reynolds said:
"HLDS is a tightly couple system which won't benefit from the loosely
coupled
threading available in SMP machines. The server is very serial, it collects
data from everyone for a frame, calculates the results and then sends them
out (this is obviously a simplification). Adding another thread would be
useless, it would probably end up lessening performance due to the overheads
require for synchronisation."
I don't remember anyone from valve commenting on hlds being
multithreaded since then, but if you want to search the archives you
might find it. Most of the discussions back then were just us server
operators talking back and forth about it. Back then SMP was pretty new,
and to further confuse the issue there were SMT cpus, I vaguely recall
the old PIII cpus could be ran in dual thread mode or was it the PIVs?
So we spent some time talking about what good this new fangled
technology would do us.
On 03/11/2012 12:04 AM, Timo Schrappe wrote:
Considering that there is no search in the archive, can you post the link to
that conversation, please?
I want an official statement from a valve developer.
In Germany, the host companies are promoting that they have that option to
"bind" the daemon on multiple core. Is this bullshit?
Timo
On 11.03.2012, at 01:14, Ook wrote:
Several years ago this topic was brought up, and IIRC someone from Valve said
it just wasn't going to happen because of all of the work it would take. Hlds
was developed back when cpus did not have multiple cores and a PIII 450MHz was
a hot machine. Reverse engineering the code to add concurrency just isn't worth
the effort.
I think my first OP4 server was run on a PIII 800MHz, and then got moved to an
Athlon. And even on those relatively old and slow boxes it did not use a
significant amount of cpu.
On 03/10/2012 12:26 PM, Timo Schrappe wrote:
Nobody can say what exactly is right?
Is there no documentation? How long does this game exist?...
Timo
On 10.03.2012, at 09:06, hlds wrote:
For HLDS? Are you sure?
I know that SRCDS can use multiple cores and the feature is actually enabled
by default since few months, but HLDS is single-threaded as far as I know.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bruno Garcia
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2012 3:13 AM
To: Half-Life dedicated Linux server mailing list
Subject: Re: [hlds_linux] Multithreaded
There is a command parameter that allows multicore support.
However, this is **not** recommended, and it's for the best to stay within
one single core.
Cheers mate!
- B
On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 5:27 PM, Timo Schrappe<[email protected]> wrote:
Hello together,
is it true that hlds is multithreaded? hl.exe is not, right?
I mean there is no multicore support at all...
Timo
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