[bf1942] windows vs linux

[James Gurney]

Tristan Gulyas wrote:

> We've found we can't run more than two 12 player CS servers on an Athlon
> 2500+/512MB/40GB without them chugging and having random ping spikes.  Mind

Hmm. I used to run a server which was a dual P3 1GHz with 1GB of ram. It 
ran 2 16 player CS servers (constantly full), 3 Quake 3 servers (full 
quite a lot of the time) and an RTCW server (full almost all the time) 
It was always very smooth, and that was over the internet, not a LAN. 
The dual proc may have helped, but I would expect a single Athlon 2500+ 
to be able to handle at least 2 simultaneous 20 player CS servers.

> I love Linux for the ease of administration and management but it seems that
> *something* just isn't up to scratch here.

 From what you've said, my first guess would be network. What network 
cards are you using? If you use el-cheapo realtek cards, expect problems 
like this (although the fact that it works under Windows seems strange) 
My personal preference is the Intel Etherexpress cards, which are well 
supported under Linux and have always given me awesome performance. Some 
people swear by 3Com cards. My experience with them is that they're 
expensive and don't play well with Cisco routers (whose fault this is is 
left as an exercise to the reader). At any rate, YMMV.

If it's not the network card, I'd start looking at kernel network 
configuration tweaking. There's a lot of settings you can tweak for 
optimal performance, and if you're not already compiling a kernel for 
the right architecture, that can help (the fact that you said it 
performs better under Windows suggests it could be a kernel optimization 
problem).

You should also try asking on the hlds_linux mailing list, as there's a 
lot of folks on there who have a great deal of experience running the CS 
servers and can probably tell you what you should be expecting out of 
similar hardware.

Hope this helps,

James