What are the current requirements for hosting an NS2 Server

ghostdlr

According to the wiki:
Maxplayers Min. Clock Speed Min. RAM Bandwidth (down/up)
12 3.0GHz 2GB [to be updated]
16 3.6GHz 2GB [to be updated]
20 4.0GHz 2GB [to be updated]
24 4.4GHz 2GB [to be updated]

There have been lots of performance improvements lately so what are the minimum requirements for hosting a 24 slot server at this point ?
Do you still need an overclocked CPU ?


I can't find a hosting company that offers overclocked servers .

SupaDupaNoodle

You should talk to @SupaFred or @wooza about this.

GhoulofGSG9

The wiki is quiet outdated. Those specs were needed back when NS2 was still a Beta.

These days i would say everything better single core performance wise than a i5-2500K should be able to host one 18-24 slot instance per physical core.

ghostdlr

One more question, if anyone is willing to answer ... how do I host a 32 slot server ?

I downloaded a hex editor but i can't figure out the address i need to change .

GhoulofGSG9

ghostdlr wrote: »

One more question, if anyone is willing to answer ... how do I host a 32 slot server ?

I downloaded a hex editor but i can't figure out the address i need to change .

A user found a way to remove the player limit check a long time ago. More details can be found at his blog

Please be aware that the game is not designed nor intended to run with more than 24 players. By removing the limit you and users on your server will loose any claim for officially support.

wooza

After two years of us proving those standards outdated and evolving past them and you, you're still going to claim you could ignore 30% of the playerbase? RIP NS2

BeigeAlert

ghostdlr wrote: »

One more question, if anyone is willing to answer ... how do I host a 32 slot server ?
I downloaded a hex editor but i can't figure out the address i need to change .

I'm sorry man, we can't help you reverse-engineer the game like this.
I'd also discourage you from doing this just because the game really isn't designed to handle this many players, performance-wise AND gameplay-wise. It leads to bad performance, especially if you're not investing in some ridiculously powerful hardware... and even then it's a bit iffy.

wooza wrote: »

After two years of us proving those standards outdated and evolving past them and you, you're still going to claim you could ignore 30% of the playerbase? RIP NS2

Don't get me wrong, I certainly appreciate everybody that is willing to put up the time, effort, and $$$ to host servers for this game, but I think your efforts would be better spent putting up servers with the regular number of player slots. I've tried playing on your servers many times, and every time it's been utter chaos with less than desirable performance. I just don't understand the fixation on having so many players on one server.

Pelargir

I really but really appreciate you Ghoul and Beige but this kind of reaction and answer isn't really something you should be claiming on public forums, especially now you're both part of the new development team. You have but one goal which is to make the game growing up and ensure the game to not die - I used not to like larger servers as you do but you can't definitely ignore them. The current shape of the community doesn't allow you this. I'm not against the fact you don't acknowledge >24 slot servers but you shouldn't at least keep trying to convince on public forums that the game isn't designed for more than 12 vs. 12.

This member is joining our community and even more, wishes to provide a server, putting him away by saying he shouldn't provide a such large server will only lead him to not provide a server at all. If you really aim to make this game bigger, you should really think about what the community wants, and looking at what servers are regularly full, it seems obvious the community wants large servers to stick around and be maintained.

I don't want to drift off topic but sincerely, think about it.

GhoulofGSG9

Pelargir wrote: »

I really but really appreciate you Ghoul and Beige but this kind of reaction and answer isn't really something you should be claiming on public forums, especially now you're both part of the new development team. You have but one goal which is to make the game growing up and ensure the game to not die - I used not to like larger servers as you do but you can't definitely ignore them. The current shape of the community doesn't allow you this. I'm not against the fact you don't acknowledge >24 slot servers but you shouldn't at least keep trying to convince on public forums that the game isn't designed for more than 12 vs. 12.

This member is joining our community and even more, wishes to provide a server, putting him away by saying he shouldn't provide a such large server will only lead him to not provide a server at all. If you really aim to make this game bigger, you should really think about what the community wants, and looking at what servers are regularly full, it seems obvious the community wants large servers to stick around and be maintained.

I don't want to drift off topic but sincerely, think about it.

I didn't say he should not provide such kind of server at his own risks.

That we don't and can't support these servers is mostly technical. When you design software you also define certain limits for it's usage.

While implementing and maintaining your software you always consider those limits. NS2 was originally designed to work with 32 players but that was later adjusted to 24 players due to performance and game design reasons.

NS2 has been developed with 24 max players in mind for almost 3 years now. Meaning many algorithms NS2 uses are designed to work with max 24 players. You can use it beyond 24 players because most of the engine was created with 32 players in mind or tries to avoid such kind of limits.

However we as software engineers still can't and won't support any usage outside the set limits because we can't guarantee that the software will work the way it should in those cases. Moreover we even know that there are special issues outside the boundaries thanks to wooza sending us his crash reports.

You could now argue that due to the community demands we should increase the max limit back to 32 players again and make sure to adjust every algorithms that currently has issues with more than 24 players. And that's open to debate.

But basically what you ask for here is support by a manufacturer for a beyond the specifications modified product. As manufacturer it's UWE's right to deny those requests like any other manufacturer out there.

An example from the real world would be that you won't find any car manufacturer to repair damage caused by custom engine modifications.

Obraxis

In a nutshell, you're free to create your 32 player servers if you wish, but 'at your own risk'.

It's true Wooza server has provided great information and helped find issues that have eventually led to increased stability of NS2, but this is only due to the fact at 32 players, it's pushing the software past it's designed limit in many areas.

It's unlikely we will be able to increase the official support to past 24 players, as significant engine work would need to be done and larger maps would need to be constructed, which is out of our current scope of work.

SupaFred

@ghostdlr Ghoul knows more about this so read his post about performance. All I know is that NS2 server used to require a lot more resources than it does today. That post on the wiki was outdated even when I started my servers two years ago.

ghostdlr

It still requires a lot of resource . I tried hosting a server on a Xeon 1245v2 and it became unplayable after 18-20 players connected .

axamdeep

We recently added two servers: China #1 & China #2. According to the monitoring results, an Intel E3 1230 V2 3.30GHz CPU is enough to meet a 24 slots server, but when it is at 24/24, the uploading bandwidth occupancy of the server would have been using ~200KB/s at the game beginning and ~500KB/s when the battle raged (greandes exploding + voice communicating + lerks' gas everywhere + ARCs firing etc.).

axamdeep

Need to add information that 2 of the vanilla vote options (randomize + force even teams) have been disabled because they would weirdly crash the server sometimes. We use M>Shuffle by Shine Administation MOD instead.

BabblerKing

That's the pregame crash, where two attempts to fix it have already failed. But it's just Wooza's getting it anyways, so we can ignore that, right?
I've advised the gentleman how to collect and send in crash dumps of that.
Oh and another server called Bacon's NS2 Server recently ran into hc.
http://ns2servers.devicenull.org/servers/1709253/67.177.64.149:27016/?date=11/26/2015
But that only happens on... why the fuck do I even bother...

CCTEE

How popular / dead is NS2 in China anyway?

Yojimbo

ghostdlr wrote: »

According to the wiki:
Maxplayers Min. Clock Speed Min. RAM Bandwidth (down/up)
12 3.0GHz 2GB [to be updated]
16 3.6GHz 2GB [to be updated]
20 4.0GHz 2GB [to be updated]
24 4.4GHz 2GB [to be updated]

There have been lots of performance improvements lately so what are the minimum requirements for hosting a 24 slot server at this point ?
Do you still need an overclocked CPU ?


I can't find a hosting company that offers overclocked servers .

NS2 requires ;-

•1840's reciprocating piston steam engine
•1960's salon hair dryer
•A small demon child to manage bandwidth
•42 soft boiled eggs
•Discobobulator

ONLY then you will have a hardware setup capable of reaching a server tick rate of 15 with 16 player slots.

Hope this helps.

Archie

My requirements were different because different hardware provides different kinds of stability, for instance my amd 8350 overclocked to 4.6ghz can handle 24players (with increased movemenrat rates to 40) maintaining >40idle pretty much till end game, yet when downclocked to 4ghz(stock) it won't handle 18 without dropping below 20idle which brings up a whole load of issues like rubber banding and red/yellow plugs.

Sylvis pc on the other hand an intel i7 from previous generation from 2010 can handle 4ghz at 18-24 player slots with >30-40idle most of the game (with increased movement rates to 40)

I've done testing with a 32core server, 16core server xeon generations, pentium 2, even android phones running linux. Y
You will not get any benefit hosting on enterprise hardware other then unlimited rubberbands!.

If you're serious about hosting for the community then get a minimum 4ghz for 18slots to actually feel how solid it can be without hitching (when applying increased movementrate)

Some larger servers are running at 5ghz and over and can handle many different connections through various tricks but it's not an easy feat when you are not very experienced with operating system maintenance and don't know the short stick through your tcp/ip networking stacks.

I was hosting #1 Quality server in the serverlist a few months back with a 4.6-4.8ghz AMD processor which is surprising because some of the other server owners spent hours trying to invest in optimisation when all i did was disable 99% of running services, had a hardware firewall in the place of everything blocking anything not related, went through the registry and optimized my networking settings as much as possible

ps:yeah i had ns2 server running on an android tablet overclocked that baby to 2ghz and it ran with bots but wouldn't accept connections for myself to join!

i5-2500K should be able to host one 18-24 slot instance per physical core.

Haha at stock speeds, yeah it will host a 24slot server but you'll get a shitton of server idling under 20 throughout the game for even miliseconds which is completely unacceptable that people in all the popular servers which aren't over 24slots, terrible reg.

DC_Darkling

Well lets be honest here.
IF you setup a new server, regardless if you want to look into rates or not, you should always keep a eye on perfmon loglines.
Idle cpu is but one factor in the performance of the whole.

I do agree that hardware is different and behaves different.