A Word On AI Servers
Greetings! I've been playing around with a bot server and have noted some things over the course of the last few months.
With 32 bots playing the server doesn't have much cpu time devoted to T2 due the relatively efficient code but didn't like the fact the server would consume around 200w of power with just about any exertion. i remedied this by swapping in a low wattage Xeon of the same socket and setting the power subsystem to only use full performance of the mem and drive systems, turbo boost is disabled. This brought idle watts down to 80 and lower and play was unaffected. So there's that if you want to run a server and not have it noticed in your power bill.
Another thing noted was increasing priority seemed to have a detrimental effect on gameplay. One issue noted at higher than normal priority is nonreg laser hits, setting the server back to normal pri seemed to allow for a noticeable increase in laser rifle registers. This may also tie in with odd random crashes, if you run at high or real time pri you may be causing the code to stall as the parent may be waiting for the child thread to say something while the child's waiting for the parent to say something and the pri is keeping that from happening, with 4 threads per T2 server noted in task manager. There may be some disk issue involved if disk access is preempted, net activity should not be in question regardless the pri. So in my case higher pri isn't always better.
My server bios gives options for how an admin wants their memory system used, either as active ecc or simple memory mirroring. In memory mirroring the total ram count is halved as the memory contents are mirrored. I tried this and after a few hours running weird things came up in gameplay. I restarted the server and selected ecc as the mem protocol and weirdness was resolved. This reminded me of an old tale told me by T2 vets ages ago that T2 didn't like to live on RAID0 disks, that said memory mirroring isn't like RAID0 at all, more like RAID1. Also right now my T2 server install is on a hardware 15krpm sas RAID0 array and seems to be happy.
Something that did provide a bit smoother gameplay was setting affinity to only one core or a specific few cores instead of all 8 or whatever n cores you have. At issue with my specific server is HT, hyperthreading is enabled; some of the cores are in essence vestigial, meaning they're not full cores. If you set affinity to some cores but not others in a HT system you need to know what specific cores are literal and what are virtual or weird things may happen. So in this server I gave up on setting affinity and suggest you do the same if you have a system that employs HT but it will work fine in a server that isn't HT.
One of the things I note in several bot servers I've visited recently is stuttering during gameplay, in some cases severe enough to be unplayable and even nauseating.
This detriment is almost always resolved with the simple application of this control typically found either in serverprefs or in your autoexec folder;
"SetPerfCounterEnable(0);"
I have to assume each server that stutters has perfcounter set to 1 meaning it's enabled and this is the number one cause of stutter in servers, set it to 0 and enjoy a smooth server.