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FPS Issue

Moderator: MiRai

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Sphiinx

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Joined: Mon Mar 23, 2015 7:35 pm

Post Tue Jul 04, 2017 7:55 pm

FPS Issue

Redacted.

User removed their post, but it was asking about running 40 game clients on a single machine.
Having information on this forum is helpful to anyone reading it.
-Moderation
Last edited by Sphiinx on Tue Jul 04, 2017 10:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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MiRai

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Post Tue Jul 04, 2017 9:59 pm

Re: FPS Issue

This is just a quick reply, but...

A modern-day machine can only reliably run so many pieces of software (e.g. game clients) simultaneous, and it's likely that you're just simply overloading your system because so much is going on. At some point, you push your system beyond what it's capable of handling, and looking at usage numbers doesn't tell you that.

Shut down half of those game clients. Does performance increase? Shut down half again. Does performance increase even further?

If the answer is "yes," then you're simply overloading your system.
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bob

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Post Wed Jul 05, 2017 2:24 am

Re: FPS Issue

MiRai wrote:A modern-day machine can only reliably run so many pieces of software (e.g. game clients) simultaneous, and it's likely that you're just simply overloading your system because so much is going on. At some point, you push your system beyond what it's capable of handling, and looking at usage numbers doesn't tell you that.
To expand on this. Once you run enough threads on any system, you can end up in a situation where the CPU spends more time context switching that it does processing your application (game) - this is the reason for having processors with multiple cores, which can process 1 thread each simultaneously. A single core system can process 1 thread, then context switch to the next thread, etc. A 4 core system can process 4 threads simultaneously, and switch to 4 new threads etc. More cores, more threads are able to be processed at the same time, but there are still limits in the amount of threads a single core can eventually process before it gets bogged down in switching between them. You also need to remember that other things can take priority over your application, eg. "interrupts", such as an incoming packet on the NIC, the keyboard or mouse, or even the need to play a sound - mostly driver type things, but essentially anything in the Windows Kernel can usurp CPU time from your application.

You can also end up with I/O latency depending on number of disks you're reading from, disk locations of data, whether it is the same path\file (as these will be cached in the disk buffer), interface, caching, bus saturation, etc.

If you run multiple copies of the same application (game) from different folders/paths, you increase ram usage. The main reference I have to this is in the Windows Internals series of books, where it basically says, that if you load an executable/dll file from the same path, then Windows can share some of the memory between different processes that load this same file (this shows up as Shared Bytes or Sharable under Task Manager). The most common shareable item is the executable (program) code. Private Bytes on the other hand is not sharable, and usually made up of the data that is being processed (by the program code). Loading the same file from different paths result in the sharable bytes not being shared between processes. Sometimes the shareable bytes are not huge, but then sometimes every little counts.


All this is measurable using PerfMon, or other similar tools, although knowing what to look for in the results just points to where the issue is occurring. It does not provide much in the way of helpful info as to what to then do about it. The usual answers are: is there a configuration setting that I can change, is there a driver that needs sorting (this is usually more enterprise related with firmware/drivers needing to be in sync), can I alleviate some of the loading (time of day, application changes, multiple disks - reduce I/O bottlenecks as can have multiple accesses at a time, more disks - think raid for increased bandwith), can I upgrade something, etc.

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