@Pete-S said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@thwr said in Looking for a high performance game server:

Like I said before, we are already using a Core i9-9900k, the upper end of available desktop CPUs, hosted by Hetzner

Yes, but it's not a real server with server grade components. It will increase the probability of having problems.

Problem with the desktops CPUs are that Intel doesn't make server chipset for them and there are no motherboard manufacturers that makes server motherboards for desktop CPUs.

Now, you can put a desktop motherboard inside a server chassis so it will look like a real server but it will still have desktop components inside and lack things like ECC memory etc. That is probably what Hetzner has done. They also most likely use desktop NVMe M.2 drives instead of the enterprise grade NVMe components. Difference here is durability, reliability, performance under heavy load and efficient cooling.

I agree for the most part. Our opinions on ECC may differ, failure rates aren't as high as they have been 10 years ago. I would use ECC anytime when it comes to critical systems. It's always good to have, but not as important for my usecase.

It's well known that Hetzner uses cheap hardware, never said anything else. The machine uses a cheap consumer grade https://www.gigabyte.com/de/Motherboard/B360-HD3P-rev-10#kf board, 2x Samsung PM/SM981 and 64 GByte of Non-ECC RAM. That's what you get for the money. We're willing to pay more, but we have to actually find something

There is one exception on the CPUs though and that is the i3, celeron, pentium CPUs. They can be used on server chipset like C246 and support the use of ECC memory. Primarily intended for entry-level servers though. They share pinout with Xeon E-2100 and E-2200 series.

C246 (and other chipsets) do support Core i(5/7)-CPUs. Just do a quick google search and you will find several boards from different manufacturers that have Core i on the list of supported CPUs. In fact, a Core i is just a Xeon with a different configuration so they don't support ECC for example. I don't know about newer chipsets.

But ... i don't have to use Core i. A similar Xeon will do just fine.

Also, if you want maximum performance you shouldn't be looking at E3-1200 series anymore. They're two generations old.

I know, was just an example.

Xeon E3-1200 v6 -> Xeon E-2100 -> Xeon E-2200.

agree

@scottalanmiller said in Nginx setup:

But a good skill to have, Nginx reverse proxies are crazy useful.

I prefer nginx over everything else when it comes to reverse proxies. There are special purpose proxies like Traefik, but nginx is the ultimate general purpose swiss army knife.

Played the original TIM (The Incredible Machine) again a few weeks ago.

Youtube Video

A great game from 1993.

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Arrived in the office 30 minutes ago after nearly two hours of traffic jam

That's all billable wasted time that the business should be paying for.

They will tell you that you are free to live next to the office and walk.

Sure, if you pay my moving expenses

Getting to and from work is your own business. I would get paid if the traffic jam happens on a business trip. Guess it's the same in the US.

Arrived in the office 30 minutes ago after nearly two hours of traffic jam

@Pete-S said in Looking for a high performance game server:

ey run them a little le

That would be one valid option, thanks for mentioning it.

@Dashrender

@Dashrender said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@Pete-S said in Looking for a high performance game server:

There are no high GHz server CPUs.

I was wondering if this was the case - I'm expecting that Intel is building more for modern multi-threaded applications today, so there isn't as much need for high CPU speeds.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/de/de/ark/products/series/97141/intel-xeon-processor-e3-v6-family.html

@Pete-S said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@thwr said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@Pete-S said in Looking for a high performance game server:

If you want performance, you shouldn't run a VM on shared host somewhere where you have zero control of the resources used. You need a dedicated host / hardware. So bare metal hosting or colo.

Oh, that's a very common mistake. A (type 1 hypervisor) VM has next to no performance impact. Hosted VMs on the other side are often running on overcommitted hosts.

But yes, I'm looking for bare metal for rent.

I just wanted to clarify because it's common for people to think that running virtualized has only a few percent performance impact when in in fact there is a major impact when it comes to high performance I/O - unless you can use SR-IOV and bypass the entire hypervisor. Or bypassing the hypervisor with PCI passtrough on the controller. That goes for both NICs and NVMe drives.

Anyway, if you're looking to rent a server it would be very difficult to find one with a high GHz desktop CPU. There are no high GHz server CPUs. Server CPUs are tuned differently.

Like I said before, we are already using a Core i9-9900k, the upper end of available desktop CPUs, hosted by Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex62-nvme). Also, there are fast Xeons available, like the E3-1285 v6 for example (https://ark.intel.com/content/www/de/de/ark/products/99978/intel-xeon-processor-e3-1285-v6-8m-cache-4-10-ghz.html, even though it's just a quad core).

As for the performance implications: I'm very well aware about them and what rules to follow to avoid them. But thanks for mentioning it. Virtualization is completely out of scope of this topic, because I will run the game servers dockerized on bare metal.

@WrCombs said in Finding product Key:

@thwr said in Finding product Key:

@WrCombs said in Finding product Key:

@thwr said in Finding product Key:

@WrCombs said in Finding product Key:

He said he's trying to update from 16(?) to 1903 - using Media Creation Tool.. I have a USB with Windows 10 on it.. but he cant get past this step..

If Windows was activated before, such an update would read the key (or some kind of a hash / token) from UEFI.

that's what I thought, but it's licensed.. There's a product key in the System settings.
he just can't use that one.

, AFAIK.

What does this mean?

As far as I know

@WrCombs said in Finding product Key:

@thwr said in Finding product Key:

@WrCombs said in Finding product Key:

He said he's trying to update from 16(?) to 1903 - using Media Creation Tool.. I have a USB with Windows 10 on it.. but he cant get past this step..

If Windows was activated before, such an update would read the key (or some kind of a hash / token) from UEFI.

that's what I thought, but it's licensed.. There's a product key in the System settings.
he just can't use that one.

That's not the actual product key. As said before, you can't retrieve it from a running Windows, AFAIK.

@thwr said in Finding product Key:

@WrCombs said in Finding product Key:

He said he's trying to update from 16(?) to 1903 - using Media Creation Tool.. I have a USB with Windows 10 on it.. but he cant get past this step..

If Windows was activated before, such an update would read the key (or some kind of a hash / token) from UEFI.

... or some other place. Or a Microsoft account, if the old Windows installation has been tied to one.

@WrCombs said in Finding product Key:

He said he's trying to update from 16(?) to 1903 - using Media Creation Tool.. I have a USB with Windows 10 on it.. but he cant get past this step..

If Windows was activated before, such an update would read the key (or some kind of a hash / token) from UEFI.

@Pete-S said in Looking for a high performance game server:

If you want performance, you shouldn't run a VM on shared host somewhere where you have zero control of the resources used. You need a dedicated host / hardware. So bare metal hosting or colo.

Oh, that's a very common mistake. A (type 1 hypervisor) VM has next to no performance impact. Hosted VMs on the other side are often running on overcommitted hosts.

But yes, I'm looking for bare metal for rent.

You can't retrieve the (Windows) product key anymore, as far as I know.

@scottalanmiller said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@Dashrender said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@thwr said in Looking for a high performance game server:

~ 100 EUR per month

that should buy you a lot of Vultr.

Not really. But what it might get you is a physical game server in a colo

Yep, that would be the last option. We want to rent the hardware.

@Pete-S said in How does name resolution work in AD?:

I was wondering how it works because we see a problem where a couple of Win 10 clients can resolve all the internal Windows servers names, but not the statically assigned names of linux servers.

I thought if the name resolution works over different mechanisms and uses different ports it could be an firewall or L3 switch somewhere that has been misconfigured.

Have you configured them in your DNS too or does your Linux servers DHCP client automatically update DNS? No client cares about a Linux hostname

@Dashrender said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@thwr said in Looking for a high performance game server:

~ 100 EUR per month

that should buy you a lot of Vultr.

They only offer an E3 1270 v6, which is a quad core, for 120 USD

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/de/de/ark/products/97479/intel-xeon-processor-e3-1270-v6-8m-cache-3-80-ghz.html
https://www.vultr.com/products/bare-metal/

Storage is also an issue

~ 100 EUR per month

@coliver said in Looking for a high performance game server:

Yeah... either way maybe Vultr's high performance stuff would work for you.

Will definitely look into it, thank you

@coliver said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@thwr said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@coliver said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@thwr said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@coliver said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@thwr said in Looking for a high performance game server:

@coliver said in Looking for a high performance game server:

Is this Arma? Seems like Arma specs for some reason.

Gotcha

Ah. I've run it on Vultr before... I only had 6 players so I didn't need so much performance.

I know they have high frequency systems that get some pretty killer single core performance.

https://www.vultr.com/products/high-frequency-compute/

But the two big Arma communities that I know collocate their servers.

yeah... it's more like 80 players and a freaking amount of AI.

Yeah. Wish someone would write a plugin to offload the AI to a dedicated client.

That's what the headless client does. It's actually a "micro-server" where one can offload at least a part of the AI stuff. But it doesn't scale very well.

Ah, that's good to know. I probably won't ever get back into Arma but if I do...

The game is just getting old, but Arma 4 is still far away - if it will ever see the light of day.