[bf1942] windows vs linux

[Reno Romanin]

A bit off topic, but

Just wanted to say, that was the most informative post i have seen to a
mailing list in a long time... congrats :)

I use linux for all of my servers, and i run 1 16 player cs
2 20 player tfc
1 18 player bf1942
i 16 player DOD server...

all on one box, with an athlon 2100+ and 1GB ram.

They aren't usually all full at the same time, but i get good performance
out of them all, and execellent stablility.

The part about realtek cards... yes, those cards don't have the driver
refinement of some of the bigger vendors.

Go with intel cards, the best i've used yet.
The cheaper cards i've used have caused ping spikes galore. I don't know if
this is because of queing, lack of ram on the cards or what, but it comes at
regular intervals with the cheap cards.

Yes, linux is free, and wonderful, but you have to have the hardware to back
it up. (read, quality hardware, not necessarily cutting edge)

Thats all from me...

--reno

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Gurney" <james at globalmegacorp.org>
To: <bf1942 at icculus.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2003 12:54 AM
Subject: Re: [bf1942] windows vs linux


> 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
>