I've been running a dedicated server for a couple months now. We had a variety of performance issues with our VM host, so I built my own dedicated server and am hosting it on a business ethernet connection in my office. I'm connected as a player from a machine in the same room, connected via Cat6 cables; so I essentially have a gigabit ethernet connection to the server. All issues have disappeared except for one.
When new zombies spawn in, the game 'pauses' for half a second or so, even for me (so I don't think it's a connection issue). This is perfectly manageable in everyday play. However, during blood moon, zombies are spawning constantly. As such we get continuous pauses to the point that the game appears to stutter. FPS seems fine between the pauses.
I ran perfmon on the server during the last blood moon and CPU usage never exceeded 10% (on a 6 core cpu), and no individual core exceeded 30%. Over half of the available 32GB of RAM remained free at all times. Network usage rarely exceeded 1MB/sec. The server has a very fast M.2 SSD and % disk time never goes above a couple percent.
I just did a blood moon with three friends and it was pretty bad for everyone . By 2/3 of the way through it was nearly unplayable, and at times felt like I was getting 1FPS or less for several seconds, and then fine until the next stutter. But again, I don't think this is a framerate issue but rather a repeated 'pause' issue. This blood moon was, by far, the worst we've experienced. Here's what's different from the previous ones:
It's worth noting that all players are playing on very different machines in terms of performance, but we all experience very similar severity of this issue.
How do we reduce or eliminate this pausing? Or can anyone at least explain what causes it to give me somewhere to start trying to figure out a solution?
When new zombies spawn in, the game 'pauses' for half a second or so, even for me (so I don't think it's a connection issue). This is perfectly manageable in everyday play. However, during blood moon, zombies are spawning constantly. As such we get continuous pauses to the point that the game appears to stutter. FPS seems fine between the pauses.
I ran perfmon on the server during the last blood moon and CPU usage never exceeded 10% (on a 6 core cpu), and no individual core exceeded 30%. Over half of the available 32GB of RAM remained free at all times. Network usage rarely exceeded 1MB/sec. The server has a very fast M.2 SSD and % disk time never goes above a couple percent.
I just did a blood moon with three friends and it was pretty bad for everyone . By 2/3 of the way through it was nearly unplayable, and at times felt like I was getting 1FPS or less for several seconds, and then fine until the next stutter. But again, I don't think this is a framerate issue but rather a repeated 'pause' issue. This blood moon was, by far, the worst we've experienced. Here's what's different from the previous ones:
- Max zombies increased to 64 from 32
- Smaller base; zombies often were running around within a few blocks of us
- Base was made almost entirely of railings to create a cage
- Base was designed for heavy molotov and pipe bomb use, so more fire than usual
- I had 3 SMG auto turrets running; I usually don't use them. Stutter remained after they ran dry.
- Dynamic mesh is turned on; it was off for a while on the old server but that didn't seem to make any difference.
It's worth noting that all players are playing on very different machines in terms of performance, but we all experience very similar severity of this issue.
How do we reduce or eliminate this pausing? Or can anyone at least explain what causes it to give me somewhere to start trying to figure out a solution?
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