Horde lag: client or server side?

[mrmodern]

I have a small private server (4-5 players) running on my desktop as a dedicated process. I am running client on the same machine.

During the days the server seems stable. We have some syncing issues from time to time, but these are short lived and a restart always solves the bigger desyncs.

However, during the horde nights all players have huge FPS drops to ~10-20. At this point I should reveal, that I have modded the configs to max 160 zombies alive.

The CPU usage is about ~30-40% during horde night on my machine (server + client).


My question is: is this lag server-sided or client-side?

If reducing number of zombies would not be considered as an option, what other actions can we take?

As far as I understand, if the lag is client side (in my machine it would mean it becomes GPU bounded) then reducing graphics settings before horde nights should help, do you have suggestions, which settings would have most influence?

If the problem is server side are there any remedies despite overclocking CPU? Maybe turning off hyperthreading would help?

Specs of server+client:

Ryzen 2600. Currently at 3.7Ghz all cores, but I could go a bit higher.

RAM: 16GB @3066mhz

GPU: RX580 @1366mhz, 8GB @2000mhz

OS and the game are on x4 NVMe drive.

Despite horde nights I can run all graphics max 1080@60fps, only in cities or when viewing from a mountain FPS drops to ~40.

 

[SylenThunder]

16GB RAM while hosting a dedi and playing the game on the same PC? You're most likely running out of RAM, and the latency is because of pagefile.

Other things to consider are that the game isn't optimized yet, and that you are running an AMD CPU. AMD chipsets traditionally do not support this type of activity well, and Unity doesn't like to work well with AMD on top of that.

 

[Blaktoe]

I have a small private server (4-5 players) running on my desktop as a dedicated process. I am running client on the same machine.
During the days the server seems stable. We have some syncing issues from time to time, but these are short lived and a restart always solves the bigger desyncs.

However, during the horde nights all players have huge FPS drops to ~10-20. At this point I should reveal, that I have modded the configs to max 160 zombies alive.

The CPU usage is about ~30-40% during horde night on my machine (server + client).


My question is: is this lag server-sided or client-side?

If reducing number of zombies would not be considered as an option, what other actions can we take?

As far as I understand, if the lag is client side (in my machine it would mean it becomes GPU bounded) then reducing graphics settings before horde nights should help, do you have suggestions, which settings would have most influence?

If the problem is server side are there any remedies despite overclocking CPU? Maybe turning off hyperthreading would help?

Specs of server+client:

Ryzen 2600. Currently at 3.7Ghz all cores, but I could go a bit higher.

RAM: 16GB @3066mhz

GPU: RX580 @1366mhz, 8GB @2000mhz

OS and the game are on x4 NVMe drive.

Despite horde nights I can run all graphics max 1080@60fps, only in cities or when viewing from a mountain FPS drops to ~40.

The other thing to think about is network bandwidth. You didn't mention it. You're trying to get your (probably) paltry upload speed to do something it's not intended to do.

Weak connection and taxing your system is probably the culprit, as well as what ST pointed out.

 

[mrmodern]

Thank you for responses.

Yesterday during horde night I checked and I still had ~4GB free RAM, the total CPU usage was ~40% and GPU usage ~50%. Turning all graphics settings to lowest did not help. Furthermore, I OC`ed CPU to 4.05GHZ all cores and RAM to 3200Mhz, yet not much improvement...

I did not notice significant I/O to SSD either...

My download/upload is 100Mbps and it`s not theoretical but consistent with speedtest.net. Ping for all players is 2-12ms during horde night.

With windows task manager it shows that network usage is really low so I doubt that could be the reason.

Furthermore I have entered debug mode when I was the only player signed in and when I spawned ~200 zombies I could see the same thing -- my computer is under-utilized, yet I experience low FPS.

Any ideas at this point?