Server performance in 1.0

[gamerpaddy]

Every new alpha a relatively well visited server im playing on server gets a inrush of  new and old players for the first 2..3 months all the way back since alpha 14 or even earlier.

now with A22  1.0 it didnt go smooth at all compared to previous times.

the server just ran fine the first few days, no lags, around 36 players. all great.

after a few days of players building stuff, generating chunks etc.  zombies started lagging or not spawn etc.

traders started to not open up at all or teleport you out mid-day

we tought its vehicle related so we disallowed vehicles above 25 players .. which helped in the beginning but after a few more days it lagged again and traders still wont open/let you in..

now we are at ingame day 190+ and it became unplayable even at 15..20 players.  zombies just either dont spawn or not move.

the servers are restarting every 4 hours, after that it works for about an hour but then it  becomes unplayable again.

same for the second server which has a little lower player count.

it gets worse and worse every day.

compared to A21 and prior versions which we reached day 5000+ and beyond, while still being able to handle 20+ players

sure there were some moments  where it was unplayable too, but overall it was okay especially at just 20 players. 

the server hardware (from 2021. windows 10 root-server with amd 3700x 64gb ram, NVMe ssd's) isnt even fully loaded, ram and cpu loads are low.. 

The server is running allocs fixes and csmm(patron), together with a webserver and ts3 and two instances of 7dtd server.

Those Servers are using basic xml mods.. besides just a few modified items (like more damage pickaxe etc.) there isnt anything that could cause these issues, no scripts.

Many of the Players that are there every new alpha since years told me, its the worst so far.

everyone i ask  says "its a game made for just 8 players" but how are there servers running 30..50 or even 100 without the game being totally unplayable by now.

How does other servers get away with this performance problems? 

What are your experiences playing on big servers or managing them?

Are there any ideas and fixes for issues like this?

 

[Sarakatunga]

There is a problem with vehicles that generates spam on the console and the server fps drops to 5. What can help you a little is the "svtools" system, so that when the player gets out it goes to the inventory. This helped me a little, but I noticed that as soon as they put a vehicle they usually spam and the server fps drops, no matter the amount. But before it was worse without that tool.
About this alpha is the worst, I see a lot of wrn on the console as well as on the server, aside from the spam I mentioned.
Question did you notice when there are a lot of players together and they use a firearm "machine guns" against a few z. Does it usually drop the fps a lot? In alpha 21 this didn't happen to me as much. "on the client."

 

[gamerpaddy]

Yea we got that sudden performance drop when shooting zombies with a m60 aswell, when a lot of people does it at once like in a blood moon base.

but we put this under "client performance" not server, we need more data on this.

where can i find that "svtools"?  google wont find anything

i wonder whats possible via the IModAPI to combat or at least profile this where the process slowdowns are coming from

some sort of profiler from untiy would be helpful that you could start alongside the server instance to see whats going on. maybe half the map is collapsing right now and we dont notice it.. who knows.

the log is spammed all over, including messages that some character parts like specific hair color etc. is missing.

We added a auto-deletion of stray vehicles after every restart and it seemed to help a little. we could do a blood moon at 20 players today without all of the zombies just standing around (maybe 2/3 did...)

still horrible performance.

 

[Sarakatunga]

Yes, that's exactly what's happening to me, especially with the m60 in a horde, I thought it was the sounds since I modified all the sounds of the weapons using the vanilla files, yesterday I removed my sound mod and the fps also drops when using even the m60. Now experimenting I lowered the sound detection of zombies when using a firearm in sounds.xml it helped a little but it may take a while for the zombies to detect the player. Today I realized that when a lot of bullets hit a block is when the fps drop happens, the AI also suspect that it must have a problem with the AI.
 

About server tools is a tool that can help you in several things. It has a discord where it updates its tool.
https://bitbucket.org/obsessive-coder/sevendaystodie-servertools/downloads/7dtd-ServerTools-G1.0.1.5.zip
 

The option that is helping me a lot with the vehicles is "Vehicle_Collect". I have almost no lag anymore, I have 32 people and 200 z max. It just has one problem, when a player is driving and the connection drops, he can lose the vehicle. I already informed the creator and he is looking into it, I prefer that than the horrible spam.
 

Also what I noticed before I modified everything I said is that when the server has been running for a long time, some Zombies are falling, as it happened in alpha 21 even if the server runs at 20 fps and that I have it restarting every 4 hours.