Game Servers (Half-Life & Others)

[david.reed]

Hello all,

Recently I purchased a server through steadfast. I've been in the process of configuring it. I had chosen CentOS 4 which I felt was the best option for hosting small websites (w/plesk) for friends & running game servers. But recently I had some troubles with plesk after reboot/restarting the service which I resolved by adding the includes which could potentially happen to anyone here with plesk/centos. I can post the includes you have to add if anyone needs those. But getting to the point my server has been lagging quite a bit since I bought the server. And when I say lag I mean it reports a bad ping in game, fluctuating from 30-60's to 400+. It never held the high ping so I felt it must be a server configuration. I turned everything off and still had no luck. Finding a few posts on webhostingtalk I saw people with vBulletin had performance issues with the default kernel (2.6.9-22.0.2). So I grabbed the latest kernel and used cpu type 13 (amd opteron/64 bit) chose smp since I have the amd x2 3800 server. I picked (No Forced Preemption) as this tutorial had recommended. In addition to what was mentioned I picked 1000hz for the kernel timer which is recommended for anyone who runs game servers ( http://whisper.ausgamers.com/wiki/index.php/Tickrate ). In the end it took a while to compile it but the instructions were thorough and straight forward. Make sure you do the grub instructions or else you'll be asking support should things go wrong.


Read through dirtbags post, make sure everything is within your realm of knowledge it really is quite easy. Ignore the warnings during compile didnt affect me at all.

Heres the link:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archiv.../489019-1.html


So far my game servers (Cstrike/Czero/Natural Selection) all perform wonderfully now. Aside from fixing the lag spikes it makes everything very smooth and responsive in game. Now the only thing I would like is more than the 3MB/Sec xfer rate that I get to typical sites (too much to ask? )

Anyways I was ready to cancel my server until I found out that centos 4 came with a pretty lousy kernel build. Im glad I did the research and maybe they can build later kernels for people who get new installs. This will also help anyone with large forums/website hosting/databases.

Give it a try it cant hurt if you do the grub instructions correctly it will default back to the old one if trouble arises.

[Tabasco]

That's good information to know