Cloud CPU performance

[BrightCandle]

To tide my Arma community over to Arma 3 I rented a Xeon 2.0 GHz 4 core from transip.eu. At 30 euro that was a pretty decent deal. However the poor little CPU can only support a game of 26 players. Every Sunday we play a big game with us all and the community has grown a lot this past 2 weeks with the release of Arma 3. So while hardware is awaited we needed a box for a few hours every Sunday to run our game.

What I decided to do was find someone with hourly billing so we could spin up this high end box and stop it right after we were done. The costs shouldn't mount too quickly. I asked around all the cloud suppliers about clock speed and CPUs. The grand majority are on AMD and around 2.5Ghz is the most common average speed. Having no real luck and missing a lot of information i decided to just spin up an amazon m3 instance and bench it. I saw a good 50% climb in performance compared to the 2.0 Xeon in linx and the architecture showed up as Intel, that should have been enough. Alas on the day when I spin it up we ended up on an AMD architecture box. While raw performance figures in LinX improved slightly performance was worse than the transip box at around 20 players. It was rather disappointing to turn our regulars away because the hardware couldn't cope.

I have two questions really. Why do you think that a AMD CPU is so slow in Arma 3 hosting despite additional raw performance in tests like Linx and why do all the cloud holsters seem to use them and have no decent modern high clock speed CPUs for applications like this?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think that for most servers, core count trumps clock speed. Of course, for your application, it's different.

 

[MisterMac]

Depends severely on architecture.


Even if it's a huge cloud provider - they're could be blusters of PRE-Nehalem standing next to E5 SB Xeons.


Clockspeed and such detailed info in the cloud world is hidden.
Which is completely ironic since most users here care - and are technical enough to use the info to base they're decisions on.

 

[Zstream]

I would go to Savvis.com and click on the Savvis Direct offering. You can get a 8 core, 8gb , 250GB of data with Windows 2008 r2 64bit for $.65 cents a hour.

 

[BrightCandle]

I would go to Savvis.com and click on the Savvis Direct offering. You can get a 8 core, 8gb , 250GB of data with Windows 2008 r2 64bit for $.65 cents a hour.

On what are you basing this on? The Arma 3 server uses 2 cores only, it shows no benefit past that. The type and clock speed of the core also matters a great deal, and the architecture also. An Intel 2.0 Ghz 2nd gen will beat an AMD 3 Ghz core by a whopping 50% in performance.

Savvis don't publish a single item about the cores they use, nor at any point would 8 cores be any use at all. Did you read my initial post at all or is that just trolling at its very worst?!

 

[podspi]

On what are you basing this on? The Arma 3 server uses 2 cores only, it shows no benefit past that. The type and clock speed of the core also matters a great deal, and the architecture also. An Intel 2.0 Ghz 2nd gen will beat an AMD 3 Ghz core by a whopping 50% in performance.

Savvis don't publish a single item about the cores they use, nor at any point would 8 cores be any use at all. Did you read my initial post at all or is that just trolling at its very worst?!

Don't you think that response is a little harsh for what I would consider a pretty decent suggestion?

And to answer your OP: Because lots of cloud server operations like cores, and AMD is the more cores company.

 

[Idontcare]

On what are you basing this on? The Arma 3 server uses 2 cores only, it shows no benefit past that. The type and clock speed of the core also matters a great deal, and the architecture also. An Intel 2.0 Ghz 2nd gen will beat an AMD 3 Ghz core by a whopping 50% in performance.

Savvis don't publish a single item about the cores they use, nor at any point would 8 cores be any use at all. Did you read my initial post at all or is that just trolling at its very worst?!

Ouch Chill dude.

Zstream is clearly posting in good faith, taking time out of their day to (1) read your thread, and (2) attempt to help you with your plight.

So maybe he didn't fully digest the nuances to your specific situation, can't say I did either until I read your blistering response above.

Don't look gift horses in the mouth, be thankful he cared enough to attempt to help you even if the help wasn't so helpful.

 

[Zstream]

On what are you basing this on? The Arma 3 server uses 2 cores only, it shows no benefit past that. The type and clock speed of the core also matters a great deal, and the architecture also. An Intel 2.0 Ghz 2nd gen will beat an AMD 3 Ghz core by a whopping 50% in performance.

Savvis don't publish a single item about the cores they use, nor at any point would 8 cores be any use at all. Did you read my initial post at all or is that just trolling at its very worst?!

I can't say the CPU type but I do know they upgrade to the latest and greatest Xeon CPU's. It's in a VM environment and each CPU is at 2.67ghz. I apologize for recommending something without a full description. I thought you would chat with them via the online chat tool or something to find out more. Either way, being able to manage a server per hour is always a nice to have IMO.

In regards to the two cpu cores that the server utilizes for the game, I would think a quad or eight core would allow all the other processes to move to idle cores.