INtel Xeon CPU Any Good ?

[Immortel71]

I am looking to improve my servers 8 maps to be november ready :)

Is this any good because i see Ark require a lot of memory and i am looking for a new host PC.À

Intel Xeon E5-1650v3 6c/12t - 3.5GHz / 3.8 GHz
128 GB DDR4 ECC 2133 MHz
Disk SoftRaid 2x2 To

Actually i have 
Intel i7-7700K OC - 4c/8t - 4.7GHz /5GHz

64GB DDR4 2400 MHz

I know it's a slower CPU but when i check resources i'm always topped on the memory side.

Thanks for any advices !

[Sphere]

From my experience, more ram is better than more horsepower and cores. Then again, having lots of players will put that to the test. Don't get me wrong tho, you still need cores and performance. Just that when you look at the numbers in usage, you're going to think, my CPU is not doing a lot most the time.

However you can overcome performance to an extent by getting a 10G ethernet card and configuring it to work with ARK. There are a heap of advantages that a dedicated card has over on-board. Being able to use a transmit buffer of 4096, RSS queues of 8, and 7 Downshift retries, is more than on-board can provide for sure. I suggest leaving the Interrupt Moderation Rate to Adaptive, as this I find works overall best. I did try messing with that, and Adaptive works best, moderate 2nd best. Turn off Jumbo Packets and Large Send Offload. Would recommend restarting the ethernet card once a day at least, you can do this via script. If you disable and enable within 2 seconds, nobody will be kicked out of the game, as the servers will pause while it reconnects. This will clear out any lag that the game may build up. I have not yet figured out what is the minimum MTU to set the server at. I would suggest if you have not already, get an aftermarket modem, as the stock ones that ISPs give you is liquid fertilizer.

Effectively the dedicated ethernet hardware will offload a lot of the problems that having lots of players will bring onto the servers. Along with the advantage that seems to come, with players abroad being able to actually play on your server, versus on-board ethernet. My players were able to notice a difference between using the X399 on-board, versus the ROG Areion 10G Ethernet card. For one, they stopped disconnecting all the damn time, and the lag vanished. What was the words that one player said? Butter smooth.

Do not use Virtual Memory. You will shoot yourself in the leg by doing this. It is no way fast enough even on nVME to be a viable alternative. And to be honest, once you get to 128 GB, you will be thinking to yourself that you won't need it. And you would be correct.

One last thing, running the servers as priority high is preferred from task manager. Real time can work better, but sadly comes with the disadvantage of the server crashing a day or two down the road. Setting the server to start with high priority would be nice, but sadly that stopped working for me in ASM. The advantages of running your server like this, is that it will respond better to players. You have a lot of packets coming in and going out, and speed is the game.

A funny little thing to know, if you run your most popular server on a drive that is running at 7 GB/s read, and 5 GB/s write, it will allow players to get more frames per second on their game, and make bases load in much faster. How this is possible? lol... But the beauty of having 128 GB of DDR4 is that you can do things that people without lots of ram cannot do. Also that save time is amazing. Just make sure you have ASM backup your save file regularly (1 hour will do), and your ram stable. Set the drive to real time saving to a nVME drive. You will have to "mklink /j " the save over to the ram drive to do this. I mean, if you want to go crazy. XD

[Sphere]

A little update. If you ipconfig /flushdns, along with restarting the Ethernet, you can ensure a more stable connection to players. This is just from my experience. Forgot to mention this, as I got this on auto script at this point.

[Sphere]

Well I found out why people don't get kicked out when doing a Ethernet Refresh.

Put this into ASM, under Server Args :

-InitialConnectTimeout=2500.0-ConnectionTimeout=2500.0-P2PConnectionTimeout=2500

[Immortel71]

Thanks for all the informations !

[Cinq]

The frequency of intermal ram supported by xeon is a bit low. 

[Sphere]

Something about my Internet changed after the ISP did maintenance in my area, and as a result I had to change the Interrupt Moderation Rate to Low. I would recommend finding out which one works best for your customers.