Question about dedicated servers and performance

[Steve10393]

I have a large castle that on my rather beef PC runs at like 40-60fps in single player mode but in multi where I host and my buddy joins me it runs at like 20-30fps - pretty much a 50% decline. Now I've played enough multiplayer games to know antiquated programming code would slow down everyone's fps in the group to the slowest players FPS. My buddy definitely has a slower PC than me - lets call it mid-grade gaming PC.

My main question here is if i host on dedicated server will it change the behavior and increase performance (fps/latency) in this scenario?

Also this is tangential to the question but my buddy always has lag outs and I suspect it might be because I'm behind NAT with no port forwards but I am

[MrSmellybeard]

Multiplayer definitely takes a performance hit, that's pretty standard and it's amplified by which zone your in. Meadows will have great performance, ashlands will have terrible performance :)

A couple of things you can do to help the situation...

1. Run your server as a dedicated server (look into SteamCMD) and give it priority on your system. To do this (on Windows), open the task manager and go to the details tab. Find the valheim_server.exe process and right click. Select Priority and change it to High. This has given us a small improvement to performance and stability, but your mileage may vary.
2. Look into the BetterNetworking mod. Install this on your server, as well as all clients who connect. This has also made a small, but noticeable, difference for us.
3. Make sure whoever has the best PC and internet connection is the "chunk owner". Not sure if this is the technical term, but it looks like Valheim offloads some processing to the first person to load an area of the map in the world. I think they do this so that when you're spread all over the world, things perform better for you if you're the only one in the area. The downside is that if you and your whole team are in the same area and someone with a crappy PC or connection is there first, everybody suffers. To mitigate this, just make sure you're first through the portal when you go to a new area, that type of thing.

I'm sure others will have some suggestions, but these are things that I've found have helped on the multiplayer game that I host and play with two other friends.

[Awayward]

sadly no dedicated servers dont help all that much but the most extreme low performance cases.... the way performance works is basically the server is just P2P syncing....every client still does all the work locally... it will always slow down to the lowest spec pc connected in the same loaded play area.

[Steve10393]

Originally posted by Awayward:

sadly no dedicated servers dont help all that much but the most extreme low performance cases.... the way performance works is basically the server is just P2P syncing....every client still does all the work locally... it will always slow down to the lowest spec pc connected in the same loaded play area.

i figured this would be the case but just wanted to check - thanks. It kinda makes AI combat encounters around my castle impossible which is the most fun combat the game has IMO

[Steve10393]

Originally posted by MrSmellybeard:

Multiplayer definitely takes a performance hit, that's pretty standard and it's amplified by which zone your in. Meadows will have great performance, ashlands will have terrible performance :)

A couple of things you can do to help the situation...

1. Run your server as a dedicated server (look into SteamCMD) and give it priority on your system. To do this (on Windows), open the task manager and go to the details tab. Find the valheim_server.exe process and right click. Select Priority and change it to High. This has given us a small improvement to performance and stability, but your mileage may vary.
2. Look into the BetterNetworking mod. Install this on your server, as well as all clients who connect. This has also made a small, but noticeable, difference for us.
3. Make sure whoever has the best PC and internet connection is the "chunk owner". Not sure if this is the technical term, but it looks like Valheim offloads some processing to the first person to load an area of the map in the world. I think they do this so that when you're spread all over the world, things perform better for you if you're the only one in the area. The downside is that if you and your whole team are in the same area and someone with a crappy PC or connection is there first, everybody suffers. To mitigate this, just make sure you're first through the portal when you go to a new area, that type of thing.

I'm sure others will have some suggestions, but these are things that I've found have helped on the multiplayer game that I host and play with two other friends.

thanks - i am a network engineer and understand i/o latency pretty well - like you said - i don't expect to get any gains from that - the latency seems to me to be mostly code side and not from any limitations of the network stack - was hoping the server stand alone code was better but oh well

[jeetrix]

Main issue underlying MP performance = limitations of steam weblayer on which this game relies. This api was never designed for these complex traffic patterns and the game suffers greatly from packet loss interference. If (part of) your group is on wifi, it will cause perf issues due to distributed ownership, when you are close together, as MrSmellybeard already finely explained. We are still using the same core systems as when VH first released, they never bothered to optimise it in a scalable way. There were some improvements but nothing that tackles the main issue.

Tips up here are all excellent.

Also keep in mind:
Terraforming = High Risk – Large-scale terrain edits are a surefire way to mess up world performance, so keeping it minimal and controlled is key.
Structure Density = Be Careful – Overbuilding in one area (especially with lots of beams and complex physics interactions) can make the game struggle to sync everything properly.
Minimizing Server Stress – Things like not leaving hundreds of dropped items, avoiding insane amounts of fires, and spreading out builds all help.