This is the default settings in Epoch and it is what makes it possible for a server like Mellys to run 100 clients connected, with little to no issues. While there may be plenty of content to have fun with, the experience with all that content will soon turn sour when your client FPS sinks (because the server has low performance, or is under too much strain (yes this affects clients too, if the server is the weakest link, all clients suffer)) your gameplay and experience will suffer too.Ĭurrently, the thoroughly tested, recommended max settings for cars on an Epoch server is 150, and the max amount of buildables is 1500 and the max amount of container content is 1500. With these basic fundamentals in knowing how the server works, you as a player need to know that connecting to a server with hundreds of vehicles, or tens of thousands of buildables, or tons of AI-missions will not necessarily be a good thing for your game experience.
Dedicated, native servers will see better performance than a VM. It should also be known that the arma3 server-file has issues with running on virtual machines (VMWare, or XenServer, etc.) essentially the performance output gets negated by as much as 30% if you run it on the same hardware as a dedibox, ARMA 3 is currently () not well-optimized for running on Virtual Machines. He will lag/desynch based on his low-performance equipment, and that will affect you, and anyone trying to blow that car up (because the car will behave erratically). But the same thing is if you and your friends are connected and your friend has a shitty Internet connection and/or computer and happens to be driving the car. It is also important to know that in player interaction, the weakest link is usually the cause of the issues, for example: It doesn't matter if you are connected with a 1Gbit connection, with an awesome CPU and GPU, if the server is overloaded, that's the problem, you can't fix it clientside. Whereas "desynch" (client and server not having the same information, and thus weird things happen) and rubberbanding (which looks like teleporting/warping) is usually a combination of over-stressed CPU (server and or client-side). This is also when you will see lag happening. When the bandwidth is maximized on either the server-side or the client-side, you will see a yellow chain link in your bottom right corner, or a red chain link, depending on how overloaded the server or the client is with data. A lot of this information is also sent from the server, and Arma 3 Epoch is one of the most bandwidth-intensive games out there.
Now, multiply physics, and inventory calculations per client, the more clients connected, the more vehicles driving, swimming, running, flying, inventories getting opened, the more the strain on each client, and on the server. The less a container can hold, the less strain on the server. So if you have, say 300 items in a container, all those 300 will load in a big packet, which sucks some server performance. are fed from the database in real-time, essentially the more items a container holds, the heavier the load on the server for each time that inventory is loaded. Naturally more calculations are required when something happens to that vehicle (driving, getting shot at, colliding, etc.) but essentially the computing power for all these physics & ragdoll items will take a toll.įurthermore, all inventories and contents of traders, tents, vehicles, etc. All vehicles run physics-calculations in real-time 24/7 (100% all the time) this means that for every car you have on your server, the server and each client will have to run the calculations for physics on that vehicle all the time. Every client has to load and calculate ALL clan logos/custom graphicsĪnother thing to consider is the fact that there is something called ragdoll and physics in ARMA 3, basically it is a set of calculations applied to each player body, each AI-body, and each car, and for a moment, also every placed building block. Every client has to load and calculate ALL AI movement Every client has to load ALL the vehicles Every client has to load ALL base building items * Every client will load and have to calculate everything that occurs on your server, meaning: There are several ways for you to optimize your server-side performance to get the maximum speed out of your Epoch server (because Epoch loads so many building items, it requires even more processing power).īefore I continue there is a fundamental thing you have to know and consider when you configure your Epoch server: It's a fact that ARMA has a dated architecture that only recently received some optimizations for multiple cores and utilizing them for different purposes (multi-tasking and multi-threading).