New Physical Machines [Technical] + Location Change

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hey all,

 

I just wanted to announce our plan with our current physical machines under the Anycast network.

 

As stated in this thread, we have been looking for a new hosting provider. I've been looking at Ready2Frag and after talking to their management, they were very polite, professional, and interactive. With that said, they gave me all the information I requested (non-like many other providers I tried looking into). I would like to note that Nexril (our current hosting provider) has been very great to us. They did have some issues with their router causing downtime recently (which has been fixed since), but stuff like this happens with any provider. Everything other than that has been great.

 

With all of the above said, we have had issues with the Dallas location as a whole. There seems to be poor routing with Vultr's Dallas location. This resulted in the route from the physical machines to our Anycast network going out of line quite often (e.g. the machines would go to Chicago instead of Dallas). This resulted in latency overhead on the network which is definitely not acceptable. While this isn't a problem with Nexril (it's on Vultr's side), it seems that Vultr doesn't want to address this issue yet. Since Vultr isn't replaceable until we acquire our own ASN, the best course of action would be to find a hosting provider in another area where Vultr doesn't have many issues. Ready2Frag is located in Chicago. Vultr's Chicago location hasn't had any problems from what I've seen.

 

Ready2Frag's prices on the higher-end CPUs are also way better than Nexril's. For an i9-9900K on Nexril, it'd be $259.00/m whereas on Ready2Frag, it will only be $149.00/m. See below for more information. Here's a list to Ready2Frag's dedicated servers page.

 

What Happened To The AMD Ryzen 9 3900x?

Initially, we planned to buy a machine from Ready2Frag which included the newly released AMD Ryzen 9 3900x processor. This processor came with 12 cores and 24 threads and had only a 6% single-threaded performance decrease compared to the Intel i9-9900K. We were planning to only have to pay around $200.00/m for this which would have been a win compared to our current $300.00/m setup with Nexril along with better single-threaded performance against the Intel i7-7700K (our best CPU with Nexril at the moment).

 

Unfortunately, the processor's price is going up due to not enough being in-stock. With that said, the hosting provider is having issues running this processor at a decent clock speed while also keeping it cool (they're limited to a certain temperature that the data center they colocate with enforces). Therefore, they wouldn't be able to sell this for quite a bit (they need to do more testing and tweaking).

 

The price of a server with the AMD Ryzen 9 3900x from Ready2Frag would be $249.00/m. This would include 128 GBs of RAM, 2 TBs NVMe, and 30 TBs of bandwidth. The sad part is we really only need 64 GBs of RAM and 1 TB of NVMe storage maximum. Sadly, they aren't doing any custom builds/special configurations at this moment (they will be doing this in the future, though).

 

The Intel i9-9900K + New Machines

With the above stated, their machine with the Intel i9-9900K is only $149.00/m which isn't a bad price. This would include 64 GBs of RAM, a 1 TB NVMe, and 30 TBs of bandwidth. The Intel i9-9900K comes with 8 cores and 16 threads as well.

 

The Intel i9-9900K basically holds first place in single-threaded performance (which is the most important for a majority of game servers) and has a 6% increase in single-threaded performance compared to the Ryzen 9 3900x. You can find some useful benchmarks here (sorted by single-threaded points).

 

I made the decision that we're going to be purchasing two of these machines. This will give us 16 cores and 32 threads spread across both machines total. This will also be a total of $298.00/m which still beats our current setup with Nexril along with giving us an extra 4 cores and 8 threads to play with (to use for expanding, etc.).

 

Our hosting provider will be making adjustments to the BIOS settings which will enable the processor to turbo-boost on all cores at around 4.2 - 4.4 GHz. This would be raised higher if possible, but unfortunately it would run too hot. Regardless, it will still perform better than our current Intel i7-7700K that runs at 4.4 GHz due to IPC improvements, etc. This is really the best processor our game servers can run on in terms of single-threaded performance at the moment.

 

For additional bandwidth, it will be an additional $5 - $10.00/m per 10 TBs which is a fair price and affordable if we do go over the 30 TBs limit (I expect to be hitting around 40 - 50 TBs per machine, so I do expect to exceed the limit). Our servers use A LOT of bandwidth due to our optimized settings and tick rates we run.

 

Here are the specs of the two machines we're getting (each):

 

• Intel i9-9900K @ 4.2 - 4.4 GHz.
• 64 GBs of DDR4 RAM.
• 1 TB NVMe.
• 30 TBs of Bandwidth.
• Located in Chicago, IL.
• $149.00/m.

 

These machines will total to $298.00/m.

 

If for whatever reason this doesn't work out, I am willing to donate $298.00 back to make up for what we paid. Though, I'm confident things will work out well and after this hosting provider is proven stable, we'll move all of our servers from GS08 - GS10 to the new machines and cancel the old from Nexril (probably within a week or two).

 

Our hosting provider will have these machines ready by the end of tomorrow (Friday, August 9th, 2019)!

 

IP Geo Location

We will be looking into setting our IP block's geo-locate to Chicago instead of Dallas. The geo location being located in Dallas is not a big deal as of right now. We will need a change to Compressor to forward ICMP requests to the destination machine in order to get our IP2Location's geo-location changed since they ping the IP you are requesting to change to see if the location matches up.

 

Overall, this should be a great switch for us and will result in even better performance on our game servers! This will also give us room to expand.

 

If you have any questions, please let me know!

 

Thank you for reading.

[ACanadianAsian 22 / 1,450]

Now we are talking with i9-9900k! i did say in discord we are upgrading our machine. 

 

Lets go!

[Bara 38 / 2,029]

Nice upgrade. 👌