Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

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Re: Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

Postby dullah » Wed Feb 20, 2019 12:46 am

shubla wrote:
Granger wrote:AFAIK the issue is stalls from disk I/O, according to the devs the preparations for a server upgrade (SSD instead of spinning rust) is in progress.

2019 and they are not using ssd for their game server?
I am greatly surprised...


In the professional server world, there aren't many SSD's, mostly because most server apps aren't that much storage intensive.
MS SQL Server relies more on efficient RAM usage than storage, for example.
Plus the cost of SSD's on servers are much more expensive than on desktops.
Most of my servers have SAS 15k RPM disk with some kind of RAID.
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Re: Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

Postby Valnar » Wed Feb 20, 2019 12:52 am

dullah wrote:
shubla wrote:
Granger wrote:AFAIK the issue is stalls from disk I/O, according to the devs the preparations for a server upgrade (SSD instead of spinning rust) is in progress.

2019 and they are not using ssd for their game server?
I am greatly surprised...


In the professional server world, there aren't many SSD's, mostly because most server apps aren't that much storage intensive.
MS SQL Server relies more on efficient RAM usage than storage, for example.
Plus the cost of SSD's on servers are much more expensive than on desktops.
Most of my servers have SAS 15k RPM disk with some kind of RAID.


Professional world also has cloud services like AWS or Azure, which is something that I'd imagine a game server would greatly benefit from.
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Re: Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

Postby Granger » Wed Feb 20, 2019 12:53 am

Valnar wrote:Professional world also has cloud services like AWS or Azure, which is something that I'd imagine a game server would greatly benefit from.
In case you want to pay per minute.
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Re: Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

Postby Valnar » Wed Feb 20, 2019 12:55 am

Granger wrote:
Valnar wrote:Professional world also has cloud services like AWS or Azure, which is something that I'd imagine a game server would greatly benefit from.
In case you want to pay per minute.


Yeah It'd definitely need to be a cost balancing situation, but it isn't as if running an onpremise server itself is just free.
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Re: Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

Postby dullah » Wed Feb 20, 2019 1:09 am

Valnar wrote:
Professional world also has cloud services like AWS or Azure, which is something that I'd imagine a game server would greatly benefit from.


Yes, but these services aren't cost efficient.
The best, from both an economic and performance standpoint, is to buy your own server branded DELL or HP, and rent a rack in a datacenter.
Cloud services are often shitty virtualized servers with low performance specs, made for density.
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Re: Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

Postby shubla » Wed Feb 20, 2019 1:40 am

Valnar wrote:Professional world also has cloud services like AWS or Azure, which is something that I'd imagine a game server would greatly benefit from.

Running a game server on aws or azure is pure madness.
They have shit performance and are NOT meant for game servers. They are also expensive af.
Dedicated server is just the best option.

https://www.ovh.com/world/dedicated-servers/game/
OVH Is selling some "game" servers (fast ssds, overclocked processors), maybe its just a marketing gimmick, or then not. I think its worth it for loftar to check them out at least.
I know some people that have used ovh's servers for years and have not had any issues with them.

dullah wrote:
Valnar wrote:
Professional world also has cloud services like AWS or Azure, which is something that I'd imagine a game server would greatly benefit from.


Yes, but these services aren't cost efficient.
The best, from both an economic and performance standpoint, is to buy your own server branded DELL or HP, and rent a rack in a datacenter.
Cloud services are often shitty virtualized servers with low performance specs, made for density.


Its not best nor the cheapest option really for such a small company as seatribe. Its maybe the worst option.
What if something breaks? You have to pay it, and overall, take care that the server hardware is running without problems. You also have to upgrade the hardware every now and then, something that you wouldn't have to worry about if you just rent a dedicated server.
Devs should use their time (and money) to develop the game, instead of messing around with their hardware.

In the professional server world, there aren't many SSD's, mostly because most server apps aren't that much storage intensive.

There are plenty of dedicated servers with SSD possibilities these days, been for years. I dont see how things that you said about professional servers and old grumpy databases running are relevant to the discussion in any means.
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Re: Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

Postby Valnar » Wed Feb 20, 2019 1:58 am

shubla wrote:Running a game server on aws or azure is pure madness.
They have shit performance and are NOT meant for game servers. They are also expensive af.
Dedicated server is just the best option.

https://www.ovh.com/world/dedicated-servers/game/
OVH Is selling some "game" servers (fast ssds, overclocked processors), maybe its just a marketing gimmick, or then not. I think its worth it for loftar to check them out at least.
I know some people that have used ovh's servers for years and have not had any issues with them.



AWS has gamelift too which seems pretty tied in with their infrastructure.
It seems like pretty much what you described.

https://aws.amazon.com/gamelift/

Again of course pricing and performance would be key, and I don't personally know how good gamelift is as a service, but its still something that could be an option.
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Re: Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

Postby shubla » Wed Feb 20, 2019 2:07 am

Valnar wrote:
shubla wrote:Running a game server on aws or azure is pure madness.
They have shit performance and are NOT meant for game servers. They are also expensive af.
Dedicated server is just the best option.

https://www.ovh.com/world/dedicated-servers/game/
OVH Is selling some "game" servers (fast ssds, overclocked processors), maybe its just a marketing gimmick, or then not. I think its worth it for loftar to check them out at least.
I know some people that have used ovh's servers for years and have not had any issues with them.



AWS has gamelift too which seems pretty tied in with their infrastructure.

https://aws.amazon.com/gamelift/

Again of course pricing and performance would be key, and I don't personally know how good gamelift is as a service, but its still something that would be there.

With a quick glance, gamelift looks to be just rebranding of EC2. And it looks to be targeted towards games that have varying amount of smaller instances, requiring lots of servers, amount of them varying during the day.
Not suitable for something like HnH which runs 24/7 on one server.
Dedicated server is just the fastest and cheapest option. Cloud is not that fast really, dedicated server will always win in performance.

Overall AWS is quite expensive, and their GUIs are really ugly. Google Cloud has much better design, and some other places have better prices as well.
Only reason to use AWS is if you are like forced to use it, and will rather pay much more money than you really would have to. I guess they have lot of locations and different services, which some may think is a good thing.
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Re: Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

Postby dullah » Wed Feb 20, 2019 10:55 am

shubla wrote:
Valnar wrote:Professional world also has cloud services like AWS or Azure, which is something that I'd imagine a game server would greatly benefit from.

Running a game server on aws or azure is pure madness.
They have shit performance and are NOT meant for game servers. They are also expensive af.
Dedicated server is just the best option.

https://www.ovh.com/world/dedicated-servers/game/
OVH Is selling some "game" servers (fast ssds, overclocked processors), maybe its just a marketing gimmick, or then not. I think its worth it for loftar to check them out at least.
I know some people that have used ovh's servers for years and have not had any issues with them.

dullah wrote:
Valnar wrote:
Professional world also has cloud services like AWS or Azure, which is something that I'd imagine a game server would greatly benefit from.


Yes, but these services aren't cost efficient.
The best, from both an economic and performance standpoint, is to buy your own server branded DELL or HP, and rent a rack in a datacenter.
Cloud services are often shitty virtualized servers with low performance specs, made for density.


Its not best nor the cheapest option really for such a small company as seatribe. Its maybe the worst option.
What if something breaks? You have to pay it, and overall, take care that the server hardware is running without problems. You also have to upgrade the hardware every now and then, something that you wouldn't have to worry about if you just rent a dedicated server.
Devs should use their time (and money) to develop the game, instead of messing around with their hardware.

In the professional server world, there aren't many SSD's, mostly because most server apps aren't that much storage intensive.

There are plenty of dedicated servers with SSD possibilities these days, been for years. I dont see how things that you said about professional servers and old grumpy databases running are relevant to the discussion in any means.



I am sorry to say you have no clue of what you are talking about.
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Re: Is server hardware a bottleneck for game performance ?

Postby shubla » Wed Feb 20, 2019 12:14 pm

dullah wrote:

I am sorry to say you have no clue of what you are talking about.

When you are wrong and losing an argument it is always a good way to just call the other person stupid without any reasoning. :roll:
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