Lag to the core when 7-8 people play is my dedicated server hosted in GCP

[Skandaa]

Hi,

We are facing this issue, when 7-8 people joins the server, the host turn bad I mean to red and starts to lag too much.

My GCP setup-

Ubuntu 16
2 vCPUs
8 GB RAM
60 GB Storage

Mods used Global Position, Set Piece Config & Show me.

Please help!

And I would like to know the recommended setup for lag free 12 players server.

 

Thanks :)

 

[satansun]

Same problem here on GCP (Google Cloud Platform)!
My game started to lag since about Day 50.
We endured lags till Day 80 and started to think what we can do to improve the situation.
I was monitoring CPU utility using `htop` during the whole game, but I never saw it hit 100% (except for the initial world gen).

==== Environment stats ====
Machine type: `n2-standard` (2 vCPUs; Intel Cascade; 2.8 - 3.9 GHz)
8 GB RAM
10 GB SSD
OS: Debian 9

#players: 7-8
Cave is enabled
Tick rate: 60
===========================

In comparison, we previously hosted a no-cave game on one of the player's laptop and everything was fine.
We only experience lags during the first summer when 40+ hounds attacked.

Any suggestions are welcome.
 

[Daniel86268]

I never tried the Google Cloud Platform, but it always felt like it's more oriented towards heavy workloads instead of real-time applications like game servers.

Or are you hosting it on the Google Game servers service? In that case you could try contacting google to see if they have any tips: https://cloud.google.com/game-servers

[Skandaa]

@satansun Mine was like the CPU utilisation reaches 64% is where the lag is. So I tried to upgrade the vCPUs and Machine type now I am using 4vCPUs 4GB RAM and it's a N1 high cpu models. Still I could see lags on Save but not when playing with full server like 12 full slots. Without mods as figured out how to add set pieces without mods :P

Try this.

[Skandaa]

On 4/27/2020 at 4:38 PM, Skandaa said:

@satansun Mine was like the CPU utilisation reaches 64% is where the lag is. So I tried to upgrade the vCPUs and Machine type now I am using 4vCPUs 4GB RAM and it's a N1 high cpu models. Still I could see lags on Save but not when playing with full server like 12 full slots. Without mods as figured out how to add set pieces without mods :P

Try this.

Sorry, It's lagging again after 300+ days even in this setup. CPU utilization is just 34% weird.

WELP!

[satansun]

@Skandaa Yeah, sadly, I tested `n1-highcpu-4` and it still lags (8 players, ~Day 200).
After I relocate the serve from Oregon to LA, the situation slightly improves (at least I'm not experiencing severe lags now), but many of my friends are still complaining about lags.

 

@Daniel86268 no I'm using GCP because I'm more familiar with it. Google Game Server and all it auto-scaling things seem like an overkill for me, and it requires a lot of changes and configs which I don't have to time to get familiar with. Besides, I don't seem any benefit from using it according to their docs (the Game Server thing seems like a wrapper of GCP).

 

I don't have a conclusion about the lag issue yet; the root cause could be a combination of the hardware, the network condition, and GCP.

Network & Hardware

It seems that the only two people who were not experiencing lags were me (in Los Angeles) and a friend from Asia.
The rest (in Los Angeles & Seattle) were all complaining about lags.
However, the friend who lives in Asia has the newest laptop (2+ years newer than the rest of us) and maybe the hardware compensates something. (?)

 

GCP

On the console page, GCP says that

Quote

This instance is overutilized. Consider switching to the machine type: custom (4 vCPUs, 4.75 GB memory).

According to my observation, CPU utilization was seldom over 70%. Why GCP suggests an upgrade is very confusing to me.

[Kova_]

I noticed that Global Positions tend to lag the server where there was around 8 people on the server. After disabling Global Positions, the server was not laggy anymore

Edit: we don't use GCP as a host.

[Daniel86268]

22 hours ago, satansun said:

CPU utilization was seldom over 70%

70% is already pretty high depending on the server.

70% Utilisation on a quad core machine already means two cores are at 100%, one is at 80%. The mostly single-threaded DST server with two shards can utilize two cores, plus some overhead. Those 70% are probably full load.

[Skandaa]

@satansun All are saying to go with C2 series in GCP for better gaming experience. But it is too expensive for single threaded game.

[satansun]

@Skandaa I agree. `C2` is too expensive. I could give it a try during the weekend, though I doubt it the situation may change much. Besides, it's optimized for computation, so it's probably not as useful for a dedicated server.

Maybe I should ask my folks to use fewer mods, too. 
We currently have 5 server mods and everyone has their own client mods.
Aside from the some of the known source of lags from some mods (e.g., Mini-Map HUD which we decided to uninstall), I personally experienced a severe lag without any client mods during the spring when the aggressive beefalos persistently killed all the bees around my bee boxes. 400+ stings and 50+ honeys were left on the ground, making the game unplayable near that area (in gets better after we cleared up the area). However, there could have been other similar stuff naturally in the game that slows it down.

That said, I wonder how people are able to run their games up to 1000+ days smoothly. I watched some on YouTube/Twitch and didn't notice lags to be a problem. I haven't tried other VPS. Not sure how things go on those VPS. I'll probably try some out after l'm done with GCP.

--

@Daniel86268 I meant 70% per core, but I get what you mean. What would you suggest me to do then? I kinda ran out of ideas that I can try. 

--

@Kova_ I'll try to disable Global Position. btw, how do you guys share your current locations then? Some of my folks feel insecure not knowing where other people are. 

[Kova_]

We just don't share it. If somebody needs to know the position, we use in-game mechanisms such as flare or an ocuvigil. We can also share maps via map scrolls. 

[satansun]

Conclusions first: @Skandaa we decided to host our dedicated server on GCP's `c2-standard-4` for all our future games.

We tested `c2-standard-4` (Iowa) and it worked quite well.
Although it's not perfect, all of the 6 players reported better experience compared to all previous configs (`n1-highcpu-4`, `n2-standard`, `e2-standard`, and other customized configs). I received about 5 times of lag complaints, but those were due to their bad internet connection (according to the status showed by pressing Tab and due to the fact that the rest of the players reported no lags).

The price is $0.168 per hour and our estimated monthly cost is about $13.
It's not significantly cheaper than other VPS providers, but I have get used to the setup and decided to stick to GCP. Any recommendations are welcome.

FYI, the following are our server mods:
  - Global position (@Kova_ I shall train my folks not to use this later when we outgrow our noobity. It seemed to cause a slight lag.)
  - Extra equip
  - Increased stack size
  - Health info
  - Wormhole marks