[04]Operating
Performance budgets
What each product costs in server tick, client frame time and network bandwidth — and how to measure it on your own hardware.
4 minute readEvery product that runs code publishes its cost. Those figures come from a 60-player load test on a 4-core box, and they are stated so that you can decide before installing rather than discover afterwards.
The three budgets
- 01Server tick — percentage of a server frame consumed. Anything above 5% for a single mod deserves scrutiny.
- 02Client frame — milliseconds added per rendered frame. UI mods are the usual offenders here.
- 03Network sync — bytes per second per active entity. This is what actually limits vehicle counts.
Measuring yours
Take a baseline with no mods at your normal population, then add mods in groups and re-measure. Comparing against a vendor's figure on different hardware tells you very little; comparing against your own baseline tells you everything.
bash
# average server FPS over a 10-minute window
grep 'Server FPS' profiles/*.RPT | awk '{ s += $3; n++ } END { print s/n }'