The 2.0 Server Journey / Rant

[Bryantdl7]

I am making a whole forum thread dedicated to my work on the 2.0 server, I am currently trying to make sure everything is stable, and having a lot of weird issues come up as a result.

Basically space engineers is super unoptimized, so I am shelving that for a bit, and just focusing on gmod for now.


More news to come, I will just do individual replies to this post as I dig deeper...

[Bryantdl7]

I messed up something with IP binding and now half the servers on the new hardware are 0.0.0.0 and the other half are a different address. It works, but it is messy and inconsistent. Gonna delete them all and remake properly...

[Bryantdl7]

I also got HTTPs working on the new rcon panel, and also got it to renew automatically with certbot. I tried using the couldflare https -> nginx http proxy -> game server but the latency was just too ridiculous. Taking out cloudflare sped things up a lot.


We still use cloudflare for our traditional DNS records because they roll out a million times faster, just their "protected" setup is really quite obnoxious at times, and I don't run it on anything currently. I might run it on something like the loading screen one day, but I just don't see a need currently.

[Bryantdl7]

Another issue I am running into is the BIOS won't let me save disabling SMT, which is AMD's equivalent to hyper threading. People claim it's not that big of a difference and I shouldn't need to, but idk how I feel about that.

If anyone has any thoughts on how to disable SMT on a gigabyte b650 elite board let me know on discord...

[Bryantdl7]

I am beginning moving over most of the game files now for things like data, maps, and addons. This will be a good test to see how much better things run before we fully switch over to the new system.




This process is usually fairly tedious, as a lot of these files are around 5 kb, and it spends more time indexing for the files than actually downloading them, due to their small size.

I am definitely getting to do this a lot faster than normally though, most servers you rent out, are called headless, where you can't actually log into the thing with something like remote desktop, and that is a huge pain, because essentially you have to do three steps of copying the files to your local computer from the old server, and then uploading them to the new server at that point. I am able to directly download the files from one server to the other thanks to being able to run filezilla natively on this machine.


One thing I have come up with while going through all of this, is the servers will hold the name "Darkstorm Build 2.0" signifying the massive improvement in performance and power available. We really are going to be gaining over 50% performance making this leap, so I think it is finally worthy of making that change.


Another thing I have been tracking for a fairly long time, is one of our custom addons, coroner, may be too resource intensive to continue using. Basically what the addon does is it takes all of your kills and deaths and holds onto them permanently so next time you load in you can see your score. It is a cool idea, but when you are holding onto 60,000 peoples kills and deaths, and having to use up precious server resources (since gmod is a single core application) we may want to dedicate that performance to things more important, like the server not lagging to death every time it syncs the player info. I'm not 100% on this, but we'll have to do some testing internally before we really commit to anything on that.

[Bryantdl7]

Initial testing was a success, the server is on route to my friends house with gigabit fiber optic internet. Hopefully within the hour it will be booted up and I can migrate over the build server, and then the rest of the servers soon after that.

[Bryantdl7]

An hour was way too optimistic, we started having connection issues once it got there. My friend lives 45 minutes from me in a major metropolitan area, thus the fast internet.

I'm driving down there today to do dome hands on troubleshooting as the remote desktop won't even connect right now. I made things a little too secure and now only my master password gets people in, and I don't want to just willingly hand that out.

Tuesdays are extremely busy for me, so this is a bit of a challenge, but hopefully I can figure this out today.

[Bryantdl7]

After much testing and fighting, we are in the final phase of prep work. The build server has been rebranded to 2.0 to signify the massive growth in performance, and it is live. The hostname is still the same and can be found below in my signature.

I still need to go through and mount all the games like css, tf2, etc. but that will come very, very, soon. The important part is getting us online on this massively powerful hardware.

[Bryantdl7]

The main build server is moved over and staying put, I canceled the old server just now after I got all the mounts and stuff prepped for next reboot.

There's still many more servers to move over this weekend, but I had to start with the big guns first. I also adjusted some other stuff, but you can see that over in the change log on the main site.

For now, I continue to have a crazy busy week and then hopefully on Saturday have time to work the rest of the servers into the mix.