Server CPU

[Housatonic]

So my server has gotten unexpectedly popular. Nothing major, but 10+ people on at peak time, and the first whispers of performance issues are appearing. I'm running 32GB RAM, where use hasn't gone over 10GB so far, and run off an SSD. It's a rental, so connection should be all good.
However, it currently runs with 2x L5639 @ 2.13GHz Xeon CPU, which I always have feared might be the weak point for hosting ARK. From what I understand the fancy 12 cores / 24 threads don't really help ARK much.
For the same price there's also these available:
-Xeon E3-1230v2 - 3.2GHz / 3.6GHz turbo - 4 Cores / 8 threads
-I7-3700 120gb - 4 Cores/8 Threads - 3.1GHz/3.9GHz Turbo

Or the somewhat more expensive:
-i7-6700K - 3.4GHz / 4GHz Turbo - 4 Cores / 8 Threads

Before I go making a mess of things, and possibly spending more money, would any of these be a worthwhile upgrade when it comes to performance, if people start experiencing lag?

[🂡WC_Zane🂡]

The faster speeds the CPU is capable of, and the higher its cache is, the better it will be at hosting an ARK server. Our "tournament" boxes (codeword for best performance with LOTS of players) are i7 4790's or 6700k's. If you don't get more than 10 people at a time, the 1230v2 would probably be perfectly adequate.

[Housatonic]

Alright, that sums it up perfectly then, thanks for the quick reply!

[ZánÐêr]

also wanted to add my 2 cents... ;)

If its an actual dedicated and not a virtual machine: With that much ram you may want to install/run a ramdisk and have the files copied to it to run off of. Then set a task to copy it to a hard disk ( backup ) every few hours.

This is how we have run our game servers for the last decade or so and it greatly reduced seek times / loading of new areas/ etc etc.

I know SSDs are fast nowadays, but they still don't compare to actual ram.

Anyways, its not a 'must' if you are fine with your server. Just thought I would give ya somethign to think about.

[Housatonic]

Thanks, never heard of anything like that again, but sounds very worth reading up on. Time to do some homework!

[Kogadins]

Why not share some experience with others:

I'm running a network of 10 servers. We have 4 dedicated machines - each with high-end hardware i7 6700k overclocked to 4,7GHz or i7 7700k overclocked to 5GHz.
We are also using NVMe SSDs that are - compared to normal SSDs - much faster. We have a maximum of 3 ark gameservers per machine and the performance is great as long as no one starts powerfarming (x10 to x20 harvest rates). I haven't tested with the recent patch that helped out with the powerfarming, but I can recommend to use i7 6700k / i7 7700k cpus aswell as NVMe SSDs.

Our ping (even with 50 players online) is below 30-50ms most of the time unless someone is powerfarming.

They machines are not cheap, but we pay for quality and service (i.e. DDoS Protection, Advanced Firewalls, 24/7 Monitoring)
For us service is important too, because we usually have multiple attacks on our infrastructure per week. Often PvP Players are getting mad when they got raided and then they start to attack with package flooders or other sorts of attacks.

Also you can lower the Structure Limit, Max Tamed Dinos and the Spawning Rate to address rubberbanding. BUT: The latest patches were great for performance gains. I really have to thank Wildcard for the optimizations recently. Looking forward to test the latest patch now.