Intel 7400 manual Question the Assumptions, Software stack, Key performance metrics

White Paper Consolidation of a Performance-Sensitive Application

Counter-	Counter-
Strike 1.6*	Strike 1.6*
Windows	Windows
Server 2003*	Server 2003*
32 bit	32 bit
VM1	VMn
	VMware ESX 3.5 U1*

Intel® Xeon® Processor 7400 Series-based Server

Figure 7.. Software stack..

	25
(rms)	20
latency	15
Average
	10
	5

Best LAN	Best	Typical
	Internet	Internet

Figure 8.. In-game latency..

Software stack

Figure 7 shows the software stack used in the PoC. We started with VMware ESX 3.5U1, which was the latest production version at the time the PoC began. We also used Virtual Center 2.5.* The VMs were configured with 1 vCPU and 2 GB of memory each, which emulates the physical server infrastructure used by ESL. In each VM we loaded Windows Server 2003* 32-bit and the Counter-Strike 1.6* game server. Counter-Strike is a very popu- lar game and a good example of the types of games hosted by ESL. Each VM hosts three game server processes, and each game server process can host up to 12 game users. Again, this corre- sponds with the typical deployment processes used by ESL for its physical game servers.

Now that we’ve described the technologies used in the PoC, we’ll move on to detailing the engineering and testing phase.

Question the Assumptions

Key performance metrics

The key performance metric for ESL—or for any online gaming application—is the “in-game transaction latency.” This can be defined as the sum of round-trip network latency and game server processing time.

Figure 8 represents the typical in-game transaction latency numbers that ESL observed in its current native environment.

When players are connected to the game servers through a local area network, the best case in-game latency is ~5 ms. For play- ers connected to game servers via the Internet, the in-game latency is greater or equal to 20 ms; and for the players having high-speed Internet connections, it’s about ~10ms, which is the Internet best-case scenario.

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