that looks very promising. he is getting 10 to 18% CPU usage with 20 to 24 players in each server. my servers will average 16 players a server so i guess that helps.

For what it's worth, I've run TF2 at a similar tick on a straight Linode 512, when those existed. Didn't have an issue doing 12v12 payload. And that's on a Linode host machine shared with who knows what.

From all that I've been able to observe hl2ds is fairly light on the resource ask. Just watch the mods, as you probably know.



Good luck, have a sandvich.

I'd benchmark it. Start one server, fill it with bots (computer-simulated players) and let them play payload (a gameplay type), watch graphs, start two servers, watch graphs, and so forth. I wouldn't play tricks like pinning an instance of hl2ds (the Half-Life 2 Dedicated Server) to a core: Linux is pretty good at scheduling by itself in most cases.

MVM (Machine Versus Machine, a gameplay type) is a bit more resource-intensive because there are a shitload of projectiles whizzing around. You end up network-bound, which is why MVM is so laggy even on Valve servers. I've noticed that using the new projectile shield (a powerup) and catching shots from, say, Major Crits (a weapon that fires a large number of projectiles simultaneously), is also a lag magnet. I've wiped (died) a bunch due to that lag.