| dc.description.abstract | Today, most literature about services in system administration is about conventional
services like email servers. How could one monitor and analyze a scenario where
the service in question is a game server? As these two services are technologically
different, conventional monitoring tools may miss vital information in the context of
game servers.
This thesis focuses on developing a monitoring system for a game server in order
to learn and understand the characteristics of a game server process in a production
environment. An experiment is carried out to control some of the influencing variables,
like the number of players and game server instances, and to observe the system under
the different conditions. Results show that the number of instances did not affect the
overall performance in that way we expected. The concurrent players on the server
dominates the CPU load. We find that a strong linear relationship exist between these
two variables. When it comes to memory usage, players barely affect this resource in
our experiment, but the number of game server instances (Team Fortress 2 dedicated
server) does. The server process allocates most of its needed memory in the beginning.
The amount allocated depends on which map is set when the game server is executed.
This study has shown that the game server, in this case Team Fortress 2, is a predictable
service in terms of resources. | en_US |
