Europe/UK Expansion Update (It's Here!) + New Machine To Replace GS18

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hey everyone,

 

I just wanted to provide two big updates.

 

Europe Update

I know many of you have seen updates on this subject for months now, but I have something finally exciting to announce. Please read the last update here if you haven't already.

 

The timeout issues we've been running into has been resolved with our hosting provider replacing a carrier in this location. I've confirmed this by staying on the server for 3+ hours and had others play for a while as well without any issues (it was normally timing me out for an hour after 5 - 10 minutes of playing time before). However, while this main issue is resolved, our hosting provider has stated they are making changes in the next two weeks. Therefore, I don't want to fully launch the Europe/UK division until this is sorted out. Things should be working regardless, though, and I'm still getting details on what changes they'll be making to see if it would impact us.

 

At the very least, we will be able to setup/test our Europe/UK game servers in the next two weeks and then once things are sorted completely, we can launch (this will be server/division-specific of course, as well).

 

Anyways, as of right now, ~4 - 6ms additional latency overhead is added to connections/packets to our UK servers because outgoing traffic is going through the closest POP to the UK game server machine instead of out directly. To resolve this issue, we'll need to fix the UK POP and the BGP session. Since our hosting provider has routers in the UK now, we will be able to do this easily and could possibly get this done by tonight (if not, definitely by the end of next week).

 

New Machine

Since we've been having issues with our GS18 machine in regards to CPU clock speeds and whatnot. I've decided the best option to avoid unnecessary downtime (from trying to fix it within the BIOS), we would just get a replacement machine. With this, we were offered a machine with different specs, but the same price. The processor is stronger in this new machine than the old machine and the RAM is also clocked faster.

 

The old machine (GS18)'s processor was the Intel i9-10900K with 10 cores and 20 threads. The new machine's processor is the AMD Ryzen 7-5800X with 8 cores and 16 threads. While we won't have as many cores to play with, the single-threaded performance on the AMD processor will be faster which matters most for most game servers. With that said, the old machine at 64 GBs of RAM clocked at 2133 MHz whereas the new machine has 32 GBs of RAM clocked at 3600 MHz. Initially, we were hoping the RAM could go clocked at 4000 MHz, but for some reason, even though the RAM states it's supported along with the manufacture confirming so, we've ran into stability issues and our hosting provider had reports of the same issue running 4000 MHz RAM before. Therefore, we've downclocked the RAM to 3600 MHz.

 

I am currently running a stress test that'll go on for 24+ hours to make sure we aren't running into stability issues. With that said, I've requested a KVM to be attached to the machine as well because I want to see if there's anything I can tune in the BIOS in regards to the CPU and memory performance before using the machine publicly. 

 

I setup a CS:S DM server with 32vs32 bots (close quarters) similar to what I did here with GS14 (which ran the Intel i9-9900K) and GS19 (the new machine) handled it beautifully at 70 - 80% CPU.

 

 

 

It never left from 66.(6)7 FPS!

 

To conclude, that's it for now. I'm pretty exciting for this and once I get done testing everything, I'll let everybody know.

 

Now it's time to start developing (D)DoS miitgation/prevention systems 🙂 

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,927]

Resolved timeouts sound like a good thing to me.  Good job!  Can the server handle @noclip @all otherwise problem isn't solved yet ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) /s 

[Dragoon 385 / 10,455]

Make sure that the Server won't get too much lag, or else we're going to have a repeat of Murder.

Also, RESTART THE DAMN SERVER

Edited April 12, 2021 by Dragoon

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

7 minutes ago, Dragoon said:

Make sure that the Server won't get too much lag, or else we're going to have a repeat of Murder.

Also, RESTART THE DAMN SERVER

 

Just make sure to never have a production server running a Source Engine game go 64K+ minutes without a map restart/change 🙂 

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

15 hours ago, Beaker said:

Are there plans for future TTT UK /EU implementation, or is it still in consideration?

 

I'm not sure to be honest. This would be something better for the GMod DL (@Pyros) since I'm not as involved with the server expansions themselves anymore.