New hardware and software

[Pollux]

what the fuck is a tickrate? requesting reply from Pollux

The tickrate is how often the server processes and basically calculates things. The higher the tickrate, the more often the server is processing and calculating things. So this is things such as updating where players are, user commands, hitreg, physics simulations, entity positions and a ton more. In baisc terms, a high tickrate means the server and player are synced up more often so what the player sees is also what the server sees. The reason we can't set this super high is because if we're forcing the server to do a ton of calculations very very often, it will be overloaded and end up missing things which is something we don't want.

If the tickrate is too low, then what the player sees and what the server sees are going to be off by a bit. This means things like entity positions, user commands, hitreg and all of that will be delayed. Compared to the example above, this means that what the player sees and what the server sees are not the same. This can result in shots missing, players appearing to teleport around on your screen, commands like spawning vehicles or ooc taking ages to process and a lot more.

The server will automatically adjust the tickrate to prevent it missing things, so we kept having the tickrate drop to as low as 5 at times. The new hardware has much better single-core performance than the old one, so the expected result is the tickrate won't drop as low as the server will be able to keep up. The reason single-core performance is important is because source servers are single threaded, meaning they can only use a maximum of one core.

You can read more about source networking here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki...Networking

ELI5 version: Tickrate is how often server thinks, if it can't think it won't do stuff like register bullets or update where players are. If it thinks too much it gets a headache and stops thinking for a while. Server will reduce how often it thinks if server has too much going on. If it can't think enough it will start missing some thoughts. We upgraded the brain so it can now think a lot quicker and hopefully will increase how often it thinks.