Hi,

I'm quite new to the forum and didn't really find a good answer to our dilemma.

We're currently hosting several public Battlefield 2 servers but we need to optimize our hadware-usage a bit so that we don't waste resources.

We're running everything on Debian, since our server-manager is written for linux, and the hardware used is a mix of bought servers and old machines. Lets take our top of the line machine as an example, a HP ProLiant DL145 G2 AMD Opteron 270.

From what I've read Battlefield 2 doesn't support Hyperthreading, so on all of our Intel machines with that feature we have turned it off in the BIOS. Correct?

On Dual set-ups (including Dual-Core) we haven't done anything to optimize what server is run on what processor. This is quite simple because we are only running one server per server. But we'd now like to run several instances so are we supposed to set the affinity (through taskset in Debian, not done through the BF2.exe as in WIndows) so that the servers run on different CPU's? If so, what about if we want to run say 4 16 player servers on one box? Should we devide them up so that the first core/processor runs 2 and the second one runs the other 2?
Are there any other options to fully maximize the performance while running several servers i.e. something liek VMWare? Meaning we'd create virtual servers (not Battlefield 2 but actual servers) to run the different instances?

CPU seems to be the major problem, memory usage is quite small and I don't think we'd have any trouble with disk-speed or networking.

Please share your thoughts and experiences.

Best regards,
Martin

We use taskset to set affinity of our servers in Cortex. For large, CPU chewing programs like BF2, we recommend disabling HT as it gets in the way and using affinity to make sure everything's spaced out nice.

And make sure you've got lots of RAM! They may be dedicated but they eat ram nonetheless!

Not to mention that theres a memory leak in BF2 somewhere. I'd recommend restarting periodically.

Thanks for your replies guys, highly apreciated. Since we mostly have more than 1GB of memory I don't think that will be of any trouble if we restart the servers every morning.

Do you think it's possible to run say 4 16 player servers (2 on each processor) on a AMP Opteron 2GHz? Or am I pushing it?

Also, do you know of any programs to simulate a dedicated server under linux? I.e. making a AMP Opteron 2GHz 4 AMD Opteron 500Mhz, not affecting each other if reaching threshold?

Cheers, and many thanks again.

Martin