NS2HD Public Servers

Sometimes, you can love something a little too much. That is me with NS2. Today, I have a very special announcement. For those frequenting the NS2 server list, this will not be much of a surprise. But it makes me very happy. In this article, I will share some of my excitement.

Some new entrants on the NS2 server list.

Today, all twelve new NS2HD public servers went online. Until now, six of them had been being tested in various configurations. One of them, NS2HD #1, is not visible on the list. It is being used as an internal playtest server, and will be made public at a later date.

With these machines, 216 more players can enjoy NS2 at once. Right now, all twelve are in Michigan, USA. In future, and depending on how my wallet holds up, I want to expand NS2HD public servers to West Coast USA, Europe, and Australia.

One of the i7-3930k's powering the NS2HD servers

No expense was spared in putting these machines up. They are custom-built machines using Intel i7-3930k CPUs over-clocked to 4.4Ghz. Each server instance gets a dedicated core and 2Gb of RAM.

Apart from the over-clock, the NS2HD machines have two more features that set them apart from your average server. The first is that because they are i7-3930k's, they have 6 spare 'hyper-threads' available even when running 6 servers. 

6 server instances, 6 spare pieces of pipe.

Hyper-threading (HT) is some great voo-doo magic. In abstract, HT takes the pieces of the CPU instructional pipeline that are not being used by a process, and makes them available to other processes. This means that there are pieces of pipe available even when a core is '100%' loaded. In effect, even if all 6 servers per box are fully loaded by you and your friends, the machine still has power to do basic things like check for updates, process an administrator using RDP, or other such minor things. 

Because the 6 server threads are never interrupted, you can expect an even smoother gameplay experience on these machines.

The pursuit of server perfection - Benchmarking NS2HD server disks

The second very cool feature of the NS2HD machines is that they use Solid-State-Disks (SSDs). SSDs are the real deal, offering massive performance and responsiveness improvements in some situations. The NS2HD servers will load maps, dump logs, and update options exponentially faster than their spinning-disk compatriots in the server list. Server admins will notice that the machine is far more responsive than your average game-server.

Even better, if one of the server instances on an NS2HD box decides it needs to do a-lot of disk read/write, its effect on other servers will be significantly reduced. Yummy!

These servers are all yours, community. I hope you enjoy playing on them as much as I did designing and building them. They are configured to provide the best possible NS2 experience, no holds barred, no expense spared. Game on.