What's the default tickrate?

[󠀡󠀡Altus]

What is the tickrate by default?

Does setting it above 100 improve anything?

Valve has stated that rates above 100 can cause problems on the server in other games with srcds and windows server, but what about linux?

[Mr. Quinlan]

on myservers (linux) I use default 64 tickrate. There is no sense to setting up 100+ tickrate on public servers if we tak about 24+ slots - unless You have own unit where you can adjust resources as You want.

[󠀡󠀡Altus]

I run a 32p server on my own server machine. I guess I'll just set it to a 100 in case the tickrate is lower by default.

[Mr. Quinlan]

You can even set 128 if You want, but the question is, You sure that server can handle 32 players on 128 tick? :-) I think you need to think about RTLinux for that :-)

[Maddnes]

There are many articles out there about tickrate for CS:S and CS:GO, see those since it's the same engine.

I run two 32 person PvP servers at 128 tick and I've noticed a few things...

Most people don't have their clients set properly to take advantage of the increased tickrate. This can cause several problems, but usually only for people on high ping / low bandwidth connections.

Also, 128 tick will only help you if your client can produce 128 frames per second, otherwise you're wasting the extra information received from the server.

Running a server at 128 tick will effectively half the number of players you can support.. This may or may not be an issue. Srcds.exe is a highly single threaded application, therefore faster processors (those with higher IPC and higher clockrate) will perform better than others. - For instance, even a server with Two 8-Core Xenon processors will perform more poorly than a single higher clockrate 4-Core Xenon. Most beefy processors have lower clocks but more cores. The CPU in my server is an E3-1245v2 (3.4GHz w/ 3.8 turbo).. I could run 10-12 instances of 32 person servers at 128 tick with no lag (~ 0.8 - 1.5 var).

Client settings that need to be set in order to benefit from 128 tick:

cl_updaterate 128
cl_cmdrate 128
rate 128000

Server settings that need to be set for 128 tick:

On the command line: -tickrate 128
sv_maxupdaterate 128
sv_maxcmdrate 128
rate 128000

You say something about Windows vs Linux... I've run 128 tick servers on both and see no major differences - Linux seems to have a lower overall usage, but it's fairly negligible (2-3%). Stability will vary depending on game. I've noticed a few weird things in co-op insurgency at 128 tick, so I've left my two servers running co-op at 64 tick... Also there's no reason to waste the extra processing time on bots.

Questions:

Are you running your own server? Are you running it from home or are you renting a dedicated server? How much upload bandwidth do you have? What CPU are you using?

[󠀡󠀡Altus]

Yes it's my own machine
My home fiber 1/1Gbit connection
AMD Phenom X3 720 BE

I ran the server throughout the day with full 32p activity and it seemed to take about 40% CPU according to the ps command, but with only one core running at a high 2800mhz frequency.

I didn't set a custom tickrate, so it must have been whatever is default. Is there any way to check what it is when the server runs?

Also, are you setting your tick to powers of 2 for any specific reason?

[Maddnes]

While in game, use net_graph 4 to see a very detailed overview of packets and client/server performance. The server tickrate is at the bottom... desired tickrate is "tick: __", actual realtime tickrate is "sv:__" and "var:__" is the amount (in ticks) that the server has deviated from desired tickrate over the past second (ish?).

You want a low var number - under 1 is great, but under 2 is perfectly playable. If it turns red or orange at all, or spikes to 10+, your server is being stressed too much.

You should certainly be able to run at least one server at 128 tick.

There's also an easy command to use from the console: 'stats' will show you cpu usage (% / 100 * num cores) and bytes per second in / out, as well as a few other things. "Fps" there is tickrate, it's only a snapshot but using the command a few times will give you a rough estimate of variance... it's not as good as playing in the server using net_graph 4 though.

[󠀡󠀡Altus]

Автор сообщения: Maddnes

sv_maxupdaterate 128
sv_maxcmdrate 128
rate 128000

ok thanks, seems to be running fine