Server Threading Advice/ or why should we rent instead of build?

[stevejeon 0]

I've been looking at this for a while (as a purely theoretical exercise you understand), but can't find solid information from a systems perspective.

Can anyone give give me concrete performance figures per DayZ server instance per thread?

And what model of CPU have you gained those figured from?

Is it float or int performance that the Arma 2 process needs?

From what I'm gathering the Arma 2 engine as a server instance only uses 2 threads**, uses not very much disk I/O and has a memory leak.

**(1 AI and an Offload, additional cores are used for geometry and texture loading which isn't very much use in a server and Rocket has somehow offloaded AI to the client so what's left? Geometry and sync?)

Recommended throughput for a 50 man box as a given is 2TB per month, For a 200Mb lease we should get 30 Instances, that's 1500 Users.

A 200 Fiber will cost £1200 a month. (possibly, I've been looking and as such have developed a new level of hatred for sales folk)

Without being too precise that's £36 a month for a 50 man instance in terms of bandwidth.

30 instances for a pizza an instance is an ass load of room and a twat load of power + the 1/7 running cost for cooling, no redundancy or management included, say 300W (lol, good luck with that ~ not including storage overheads) each + 30W cooling = 9KW running. ~ it's more like 18KW.

Given the 2 core idea, (haven't seen how Rocket is dealing with offload or transact IO) we could get 8 instances on a 16 core box at 32gb ram per box for 400 users at a throughput cost of 16TB per month.

Going crazy bastard scaling we could slap 4 6282SE's in a tyan box with 256GB ram and a pair of PCIE SSD cards and run all 30 instances on a single machine plugged to a cisco 1841 with SFP's. (1.5Kw max power usage for less than the 30 box outlay and you could fit it under a really noisy desk .. (OK the PCIE's are twitchy)

Yes/No?

What's the up scaling / out scaling situation here?

Err... yeah, also the server cal's... Per server per instance means 1 copy of standard + client cals. (50 per box) for 30 machines.

More instances per box where total instance memory count exceeds the 32GB licensed memory per standard cal means enterprise which scales up and doubles instance number potential whilst negating memory max (x64 = 2TB).

... Should I stop drinking?

I should stop drinking shouldn't I?

[Freeborne (DayZ) 7]

You kind of lost me as to why you need to buy a server license for each instance. That seems a waste of money and resources, unless you're wanting to resell to individual customers who only want to host a single server.

You could also get away with Windows Server 2008 R2 Web edition.

As for CALs, best to double-check, but I don't believe you need CALs for a game server, unless you are having users authenticate with Microsoft credentials (such as domain accounts, file/print sharing, etc). Based on the riskiness of DayZ, and it's unpredictable nature, I'd be going with SPLA option anyway on a month-by-month basis.

30 instances using 200Mbps sounds achievable. Just 1x 50 slot server can spike over 10Mbps though, but this can be mitigated by lowering the bandwidth settings in the arma2.cfg and balanced over 30 instances shouldn't be an issue.

[shawnbayer75 83]

I do not have solid figures to give you for the instance IDs per thread. What I do have for you is some basic numbers.

Every 50 slot server seems to take about 10mbps or like you said 2tb a month approx of bandwidth.

Currently I am running a box with the following configuration:

Intel Xeon E3-1270

16 GB ECC DDR3

300 GB Western Digital VelociRaptor 10000RPM HDD

Windows 2008 Standard R2 (64bit)

I have 4x50 slot servers running on this, with a TeamSpeak 3 server, 75 slot Minecraft server and by the looks I could almost certainly add another 50 slot DayZ server easily. However most of the usuage seems to be in the CPU and not RAM or disk I/O like you said.

Regarding the windows license, if you are going to build one 'master' machine I would suggest just running a copy of Windows 2008 Datacenter 64bit edition as the root and run VMs (Parrellels?) with Windows 2008 Standard R2 (64bit) for each VM since the Datacenter edition would give you unlimited virtual licenses on that box.

Do I think it is a good idea to only have 1 installation of windows with 30 50 slot servers running even if you could do it?

NO - Due to the fact that you will actually be using 1 installation of ARMA 2, whenever you have to update either the mod or the game files you would need to stop all 30 of those servers and then start them again. This to me just does not seem like a wise decision.

I would also suggest that if you are going to be selling these to other people that you make sure each client has their own IP address to use because if any server becomes blacklisted any server on that IP will no longer connect to the hive.

My overall suggestion:

Go quad core with Windows 2008 Standard R2 (64bit) and run 4-6 servers max per server.