CS:S Server 100 Tick, 500 FPS - Bad REG

[andrei155]

The tickrate in game is a stable 100, and the FPS is just fine. However, there are still reg problems. I'm wondering if there are any specifics that the server itself needs configuring?

cPGS is run on an openvz VPS that's allotted all server resources.

[jljr222]

If there is one thing I have been told from Game Server Providers its that running servers on a VPS is never a good idea. I don't know the technical specifics as to why that would be the case, but perhaps investing in a dedicated server where you know all of your resources are allocated properly and you have the ability to customize your kernel.

[andrei155]

I own both the physical server and the VPS. I decided to separate it this way. Now, i don't see how the VPS itself could possibly cause any problems - except maybe a few configurable options. Which leads back to my original question. Should the server itself (or in my case - the VPS) have any settings put into play?

[darren]

The settings for a VPS node shouldn't be affecting the registration of players logging in, however it could affect the registration of hits on players in the game, so I'll assume the latter is what you mean by "bad reg" in this case.
There's a decent article about this last page here ) that explains some of the server settings involved with registration of hits, etc. Ignore the first "solution" they list (no server side validation of kills, nah.. the hackers wouldn't abuse that. )
To determine if the problem is due to the VPS, perhaps install a server on the main system and see if it suffers from the same problem you see on the VPS. I'm in no way, shape or form a VPS master, but I do see quite a lot more problems from VPS boxes than physical machines. I'm not sure if there are still overhead problems when running an unrestricted VPS or not that might be stuttering the CPU availability causing bad hit registrations.

[techmight]

I can confirm that there are several reasons a VPS messes with game servers, I strongly strongly recommend *Not* running any games on a vps that require dedicated CPU and/or stable UDP-based connections.

I can tell you as far as quake 3 and quake 3 based games [such as T R E M U L O U S ] that most VPS's won't work right due to a sanity check the engine does on cpu cycles. The engine expects a constant access to the CPU, when a VPS system re-allocates those frames to something else, or 'pauses' the cpu on the vps running the game, the sanity check kind of goes nuts and drops several frames because it's not receiving the data when it expects it. This can result in anything from a "laggy" server, to things not taking as long as they should (such as firing a weapon that requires charging etc.), to other weird unexpected results.

I say all this from extensive experience and testing trying to figure out what the heck was going on when we tried running tremulous on several different VPS's.