First, some one please tell me if I spelled "Techniqes" correctly. That being out of the way, here are some of the things I have seen that reduce lag. First thing, fewer players, but that is obvious. Next thing is smaller grid, which may be tied to the next thing, which is higher process priority. Also, more bandwith is good, as well as being closer to the backbone. But, there are two settings which, if possible must be increased. Take your upload bandwith, subtract 100, then devide by MAX_CLIENTS. Round this downwards to the nearest multiple of four. If this number is less then 8, you should reduce MAX_CLIENTS. That being said, the number you do get should be the value set for MAX_IN_RATE and MAX_OUT_RATE. Now, what does GRID_SIZE have to do with it? Same thing as CYCLE_SPEED and MAX_CLIENTS. It boils down to CPU... I know that may sound stupid but I think that's what is really behind lag. When you go faster, the CPU has to do more, when the grid is bigger, the CPU has to do more, when there are more people the CPU has to do more. Or at least that's my theroy. For example. These forums, and the armagetron forums server are running on the same computer. Besides that and some routing functions that's all it does. Sits there running armagetron dedicated, that's a 2.53GHZ Pentium4 with 512mb of DDR333 with nothing todo but this. As I said somplace else the conenction itself is only 2mbit/384kbit ADSL. And I have had a lot of people commenting on how little lag there is on the server... Which leads me to believe that, as my connection is kindof crappy it must be the server itself which is good.
So, if your server is experiencing a lot of lag, you can increase the process priority of the armagetron, which will give it more cpu cycles, higher fps, smoother gameplay. In linux you can do this with the "nice" command and in windows you can do it from the task manager and right-clicking on the process, and selecting a higher priority that way. (That is from the list of all running tasks.) You can also limit the number of people playing with MAX_CLIENTS to decress CPU load from armagetron. Or you can increase MAX_IN_RATE and MAX_OUT_RATE to take advantage of available bandwith. Also, you can decrease CYCLE_SPEED and GRID_SIZE to make it use less CPU.
So there it is, that is my theroy of why my armagetron server is good and others suck, nah, not really, just kidding
. This is what I believe are the factors that have to really do with lag. It's all in the
CPU. Hope this helps some admins out there!
