New box suggestions

[Todd Holley]

4 quad core xeon 7320's with 24 gb RAM unmetered 100 mbps connection.

 

That is what I would think.

[Monk]

I am talking from real world experience.

The bandwidth issue is not a hardware one ... it is a srcds issue...

The game will resend packets if the client does not recieve them in a timely fashion. It recalculates rather than buffering and resending ... thus the increase in CPU usage. Mutiply that by a few hundred slots ... results in major increased resource usage.

 

No idea where you're getting that info from, it seems all gibberish.

 

If the server *has* to resend packets, you're talking a few packets, which doesn't even matter clock-for-clock, unless you're running a intel 32-way machine and you're doing about 100,000pps with heavy saturation due to interrupt moderation, or you're running out of CPU time because checksum offloading is disabled..

 

High PPS on a server also increases the latency for each packet, because it will moderate the interrupts so you don't spend all day generating interrupts on everything that comes down the wire..

 

Besides, who the hell would run that many slots on 1 server, you'll start running into cache coherency problems, among other things, like interrupt moderation latency..

 

Secondly, when it comes to quadcores for game servers, the Intel runs rings around the AMD. If you really knew what you were talking about instead of giving biased personal opinions, you would not make such comments.

We have built and compared these machines in commercial use, and I agree in the early days you would of been correct, but not anymore for quite a while now.

We have one monster Intel based machine that will run over 1000 slots at its peak load and it does so quite happily. Try doing that on any type of AMD server currently available. .... Can not wait to tryout the new 8 core chips in the next few months !!

 

You can have a 32 processor intel system, and the FSB will hurt you.. bus bandwidth doesn't scale on intel, unlike on AMD. HTT scales with each cpu, unlike intel, also memory bandwidth scales as well

 

Biased personal opinions? That was kind of below the belt, but whatever. AMD's processors might not be what they were, in terms of benchmarketing, but their architecture for servers scales very well for SMP, unlike intel.

 

I guess the next thing you will tell me is there is no difference between AMD64 and EMT64

 

-M