Jump to content

Opinions on Nitrado servers


RAYGUNcam

Recommended Posts

They might be good on xbox with different server hardware and all that, not really a fan of them on pc since a good chunk of arks officials are hosted by them and the unofficial servers randomly get weird lag issues on weekends. I joke around and call it the bleedthrough effect... Haven't used them this year though, so they might be better then they once were.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nitrado runs too many VMs on their machines to play well with Ark. Ark's memory usage for servers bounces an fluctuates like crazy on busy servers so the lag everyone is talking about on officials is due to Nitrado not allocating enough RAM for each server.

That being said, they may have fixed this issue by now, but judging by all the lag complaints on official, I doubt it. See a couple of responses from Nitrado employees below to a Reddit discussion I participated in a couple of months ago. Might give you some insight maybe?
 

 

[–]LockeCPM4 3 points 4 months ago 

I am an IT professional who manages large server clusters for a US cellular carrier, and I can tell you the issue is that these server hosts like Nitrado are trying to squeeze too much off of one of their machines. Period.

[–]nitrado_l 1 point 4 months ago* 

Hi! Nitrado employee here.

We do not manage the official servers, we just provide the dedicated servers (which are enterprise-grade servers with latest-generation Xeon CPUs). Wildcard manages the software side of things.

I can provide some insights about the ARK servers you can rent through our website, which are fully managed by us on an entirely different backend. We've also seen the fluctuations you describe. We allocate a minimum of 20G RAM per server, even on the cheapest packages. Heavily modded servers often use even more.

ARK performance heavily depends on the server config and mods. We never over-allocate resources, but even on an empty server, some ARK servers run very badly, depending on the savegame and loaded mods. Sometimes, players even build structures designed to cause server lags.

However, the vast majority of servers run with no issues whatsoever.

[–]LockeCPM4 1 point 4 months ago 

How many servers do you guys typically allow on one server box?

[–]storedcc 1 point 4 months ago* 

Hey - another Nitrado employee here (we have a look on this subreddit here and there :) )

It depends on the configuration of the hostsystem. We have different configurations reaching from E3-1270v5 CPUs with 32GB of ram up to Dual Xeon Systems (which are the most popular) with 2 Xeon E5-2699v4 (a total of 44c / 88t) CPUs and 384GB of ram.

The amount of servers on one host depends on how much ram is consumed by each ARK server (normally about 3 - 4.5GB). There is an active load balancing ongoing to make sure each hostsystem is utilized equally. The CPU load mostly isn't an issue on these high processor count machines.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So reading the above quote points out the problem. The "More popular" option of using the 44c 88t xeons is what is causing their issues. Those Cpus are optimized for high core counts but low single core performance. The problem is that the ark server software is not coded to handle multi-threaded processors properly.. ark will use 2 cores max in most circumstances and that means that if you are running a high core count cpu with only 1.8-2.4ghz of clock speed then your performance is going to be garbage.. what you want is a lower core count cpu that is pushing 3.6+ ghz with good IPC.

That means that most E5 xeons are a bad fit for these servers and that is the type of xeons typically used by these hosts because of the amount of cores they can squeeze into a system which allows for more servers, but the performance on these servers will have something to be desired.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Volunteer Moderator
7 minutes ago, Deathwaits said:

So reading the above quote points out the problem. The "More popular" option of using the 44c 88t xeons is what is causing their issues. Those Cpus are optimized for high core counts but low single core performance. The problem is that the ark server software is not coded to handle multi-threaded processors properly.. ark will use 2 cores max in most circumstances and that means that if you are running a high core count cpu with only 1.8-2.4ghz of clock speed then your performance is going to be garbage.. what you want is a lower core count cpu that is pushing 3.6+ ghz with good IPC.

That means that most E5 xeons are a bad fit for these servers and that is the type of xeons typically used by these hosts because of the amount of cores they can squeeze into a system which allows for more servers, but the performance on these servers will have something to be desired.

This is spot on.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 minutes ago, Deathwaits said:

So reading the above quote points out the problem. The "More popular" option of using the 44c 88t xeons is what is causing their issues. Those Cpus are optimized for high core counts but low single core performance. The problem is that the ark server software is not coded to handle multi-threaded processors properly.. ark will use 2 cores max in most circumstances and that means that if you are running a high core count cpu with only 1.8-2.4ghz of clock speed then your performance is going to be garbage.. what you want is a lower core count cpu that is pushing 3.6+ ghz with good IPC.

That means that most E5 xeons are a bad fit for these servers and that is the type of xeons typically used by these hosts because of the amount of cores they can squeeze into a system which allows for more servers, but the performance on these servers will have something to be desired.

 

10 minutes ago, Joebl0w13 said:

This is spot on.

So if this is the problem plaguing official servers with constant bad performance (especially during peak times and weekends), why isn't WC doing anything about it?

Its only getting worse as the weeks go by, soon the servers will be completely unplayable.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Demerus said:

 

So if this is the problem plaguing official servers with constant bad performance (especially during peak times and weekends), why isn't WC doing anything about it?

He only stated this is how they handle their unofficial server rental servers. He did not give us specifics about what ark uses for the official servers only that they specify the hardware and resource allocation etc. So in that thread he was very careful in making sure that information was not given out. I mean we could assume that they are using similar hardware, but we have no way of knowing for sure.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Volunteer Moderator
Just now, Demerus said:

 

So if this is the problem plaguing official servers with constant bad performance (especially during peak times and weekends), why isn't WC doing anything about it?

They are. They are constantly trying to optimize their code to make use of more multithreading and those extra cores and hyperthreading.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Deathwaits said:

He only stated this is how they handle their unofficial server rental servers. He did not give us specifics about what ark uses for the official servers only that they specify the hardware and resource allocation etc. So in that thread he was very careful in making sure that information was not given out. I mean we could assume that they are using similar hardware, but we have no way of knowing for sure.

Yes but he stated that in response to me saying that they are over taxing their hardware by running too many VMs with a game whos memory usage fluctuates too wildly for the low amount of RAM they allocate to each VM.

Also, on the CPU front, Ark uses seriously no CPU at all. My Ragnarok server is currently using 5% of my CPU on Ragnarok, and almost nothing on The Island. There are 11 people on my Ragnarok server and 15 on my island server currently.

image.thumb.png.78ee362db69e707fca77ec78b12199ec.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Volunteer Moderator
9 minutes ago, LockeCPM4 said:

Yes but he stated that in response to me saying that they are over taxing their hardware by running too many VMs with a game whos memory usage fluctuates too wildly for the low amount of RAM they allocate to each VM.

Also, on the CPU front, Ark uses seriously no CPU at all. My Ragnarok server is currently using 5% of my CPU on Ragnarok, and almost nothing on The Island. There are 11 people on my Ragnarok server and 15 on my island server currently.

image.thumb.png.78ee362db69e707fca77ec78b12199ec.png

How many cores and are they hyperthreaded? Windows is showing the percentage used across all of your cores.

In the Task Manager, Performance tab, right click change graph to->Logical Processors to see what each core is actually doing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Volunteer Moderator

The reason your machine runs Ark well is because your core clock speed is 3.2 GHz (and can turbo up to 4.0 GHz). Since Ark uses mostly one or two cores, that speed matters most.

Most hosting companies are running Xeons with more than 20-40 cores (so they can host multiple machines on each bare metal server) but speeds under 2.4GHz. That is one reason Ark struggles on those machines.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Very true. That and they run about 16 VMs to a box which comes out to about 8GB of RAM for each VM. Ark's server memory usage can go well beyond 8GB with 70 players for sure. Hell it hits about 6GB of RAM with about 40 people on.

Now I know for official servers it is a bit different, as Wildcard rents the whole machine and then they choose how many "servers" to run on them. But for rented servers it works out to 8GB per rented server.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, LockeCPM4 said:

Nitrado runs too many VMs on their machines to play well with Ark. Ark's memory usage for servers bounces an fluctuates like crazy on busy servers so the lag everyone is talking about on officials is due to Nitrado not allocating enough RAM for each server.

That being said, they may have fixed this issue by now, but judging by all the lag complaints on official, I doubt it. See a couple of responses from Nitrado employees below to a Reddit discussion I participated in a couple of months ago. Might give you some insight maybe?
 

 

[–]LockeCPM4 3 points 4 months ago 

I am an IT professional who manages large server clusters for a US cellular carrier, and I can tell you the issue is that these server hosts like Nitrado are trying to squeeze too much off of one of their machines. Period.

[–]nitrado_l 1 point 4 months ago* 

Hi! Nitrado employee here.

We do not manage the official servers, we just provide the dedicated servers (which are enterprise-grade servers with latest-generation Xeon CPUs). Wildcard manages the software side of things.

I can provide some insights about the ARK servers you can rent through our website, which are fully managed by us on an entirely different backend. We've also seen the fluctuations you describe. We allocate a minimum of 20G RAM per server, even on the cheapest packages. Heavily modded servers often use even more.

ARK performance heavily depends on the server config and mods. We never over-allocate resources, but even on an empty server, some ARK servers run very badly, depending on the savegame and loaded mods. Sometimes, players even build structures designed to cause server lags.

However, the vast majority of servers run with no issues whatsoever.

[–]LockeCPM4 1 point 4 months ago 

How many servers do you guys typically allow on one server box?

[–]storedcc 1 point 4 months ago* 

Hey - another Nitrado employee here (we have a look on this subreddit here and there :) )

It depends on the configuration of the hostsystem. We have different configurations reaching from E3-1270v5 CPUs with 32GB of ram up to Dual Xeon Systems (which are the most popular) with 2 Xeon E5-2699v4 (a total of 44c / 88t) CPUs and 384GB of ram.

The amount of servers on one host depends on how much ram is consumed by each ARK server (normally about 3 - 4.5GB). There is an active load balancing ongoing to make sure each hostsystem is utilized equally. The CPU load mostly isn't an issue on these high processor count machines.

The two Nitrado employees also contradict each other...

 

"Minimum of 20G RAM per server"

"Normally 3-4.5 GB [per server]"

 

Note: The second one seems reasonable as they do not say allocated but consumed.  The first person seems way off as nothing anywhere else supports that kind of RAM dedicated per Nitrado Ark server.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I can speak from experience when I say I have run servers that have broke the 100 concurrent player mark and my ram usage was NO where near 20gb.. that number seems like something random that person spouted to sound knowledgeable. That being said I haven't see ARK ram usage break 8 gigs in a LONG time.. back in the first 6-10 months of EA it would, but those days are long gone. Even highly modded servers don't need more than 8 gigs. I mean there are options you can use to inflate the amount of ram used for a "performance gain" but those gains are mostly for servers that are using mechanical drives and even then the performance gain is directly proportional to the seek time of the drive.

16 hours ago, LockeCPM4 said:

Yes but he stated that in response to me saying that they are over taxing their hardware by running too many VMs with a game whos memory usage fluctuates too wildly for the low amount of RAM they allocate to each VM.

Also, on the CPU front, Ark uses seriously no CPU at all. My Ragnarok server is currently using 5% of my CPU on Ragnarok, and almost nothing on The Island. There are 11 people on my Ragnarok server and 15 on my island server currently.

image.thumb.png.78ee362db69e707fca77ec78b12199ec.png

 

To make this easier lets assume you are using 6% of your cpu usage. That would be 24% of one core at 4ghz. If you were running a 2.4ghz high core xeon then that would be closer to 50% usage for that same core... and that is with a very low load. Looking at the amount of data your server is using it must be nearly empty atm... which means most of the dinos are in stasis. The CPU usage will spike much higher when most of the dinos are not in stasis... just having 4-5 players spread out all over the map can accomplish this.. and it gets worse the more objects that are built on that server.

Structure count, tamed dinos, wild dinos, mods, and resource generation all impact the cpu usage on the server... and the longer a server has been up the more items there are to track and the more cpu usage will creep up.

The problem is the server software uses 2 cores. So it doesn''t matter if you have 44cores that server can only use 2 of them.. which is why weak cores kill performance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...