SSD's & Server Hosting? - Garry's Mod

Hello, this is my first post in this section of the forums, I hope I put it in the correct place :] I know a SSD would greatly improve the performance of playing GMod but how about running an actual server? Are there any files that are loaded on the fly while hosting a server? I would think so but how much of a performance gain would you really say it would get you?

I would THINK that it would only speed up the initial starting of the server as the files are loaded in to the ram

That's what I was thinking although the server has to compute physics, I don't think ~600mb of ram usage = every physics model loaded into memory?

[QUOTE=kklouzal23;41479150]That's what I was thinking although the server has to compute physics, I don't think ~600mb of ram usage = every physics model loaded into memory?[/QUOTE] Why do you find that surprising? The likes of physic calculation is done by the CPU not RAM.

Just watch for disk access while the server's running. See if there's a lot of IO.

Everything on our servers is stored on solid states with a large platter drive backing up once daily in case a drive goes bad. How much disk io SrcDS uses really depends on your setup. The base server doesn't do a whole lot after it's started if things are precached properly but if not then you may notice a bit of jitter the first time a server has to load a model when it's spawned, but on anything newer than ancient hard drives it shouldn't be an issue. It's a nice luxury though when you've got websites, game servers and database software all running because they're never in each other's way for disk access. If you can afford them, then get them with another hard drive backing them up.

I used to run a 24 slot gmod server running some large mods like PHX and wiremod on a pretty basic machine and never ran in to any performance issues, I think you should look at how many slots you wanna host and do some testing with a simple HDD IO grapher to show you if the HDD read write speeds are getting maxed out, I can't think of much the server would need to be doing with the HDD after the initial load.

[QUOTE=Coble;41479698]Why do you find that surprising? The likes of physic calculation is done by the CPU not RAM.[/QUOTE] I don't find it surprising because that's how it is. Duh calculations are done by the CPU but where does the calculations get its data from? Information loaded out of a file, stored into the RAM and sent to the CPU. This is the whole idea behind RAM so it can be accessed by the CPU ASAP. If the CPU had to wait for everything to be loaded from disk we would be waiting an awful long time.

[QUOTE=kklouzal23;41482731]I don't find it surprising because that's how it is. Duh calculations are done by the CPU but where does the calculations get its data from? Information loaded out of a file, stored into the RAM and sent to the CPU. This is the whole idea behind RAM so it can be accessed by the CPU ASAP. If the CPU had to wait for everything to be loaded from disk we would be waiting an awful long time.[/QUOTE] I had this nice long post written out but I felt it didn't actually answer the root question so I'll put it bluntly instead. Yes, that's true. However the operation only happens once which is on the server startup and a physics engine doesn't require that much RAM (Less than 256MB) so the size could be argued that the rulesets are incredibly small. Your hard drive would need to be shockingly bad in which your Hard Drive or RAM would not be a bottleneck for something like a physics engine and would be completely negligible.

I switched to a server with SSDs recently, they start up way faster but once they're running I didn't notice a huge difference. Helps a lot with other things like web/sql servers and file operations though. CPU per-core performance is much more important for a garrysmod server.