VMWare2 / 4.9-STABLE networking oddness (RTC related?)

Zenin zenin at rhps.org
Mon Feb 2 12:18:20 PST 2004


I've got an updated 4.9-STABLE setup running VMWare 2 (W2k SP4, etc) with
the latest RTC driver (major improvement btw, thanks!) and my kernel built
with HZ=10000, which has done wonders to improve my VMWare performance
across the board. -With the default HZ=100 VMWare is basically unusable,
this is on a P4/2.4ghz box with 1GB RAM and very little other load.  I've
tried both bridged and host-only (with bimap NAT via IPNat) and both have
the same problems.

Now the W2k VMWare client seems to work well for most things, and even ping
flooding it over my DSL line 400 miles away I get a solid 15ms ping response
and zero packet loss.  However...the point of this VMWare client is to run a
Windows-only game server (MS's "Allegiance").  It looks like everything is
fine until one actually tries to use the server...  The game client is
reporting 40ms pings but yet has unplayable lag issues (not being able to
"zone" or do much of anything).  The client's TCP and UDP layers seem solid,
but it seems like the client is running completely off its "prediction" code
and not actually getting any real information back from the server at all.

Normally the symptoms shown by this setup are from someone trying to run
this server over a low-bandwidth connection like DSL with 128kb max upload
and have too many clients attached, but this setup is hosted at a colo on
multi-homed 100Mbs connections with only two test players on the server.

Is there anything more extensive I can do to debug the networking systems of
this beast?  Of course I'm also assuming it's a networking problem, but
perhaps it's something more with the server app not getting interrupts correctly
and thus just "not responding" to client events because it's not seeing them?
The server's networking is based on DirectPlay 7 if it helps.

TIA!

-Zenin



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