UT99 server performance

[JackGriffin]

There is one other pretty important component to this and it is the number of allowed connections. I didn't ask if this was a hosted server or one ran from home but that can make a huge difference. Business grade accounts have a very high number of allowed connections where private, home-based accounts have much less. You can see this when you torrent things. The torrent may not be coming in fast but if you are in a decent sized swarm and you are handshaked with good number of peers then your internet will feel all laggy. It doesn't matter if you have a 100MB home connection if your ISP throttles down the number of connections. Hitman went through this, his server performance was unacceptable with his MH server because it was so popular (but ran from home). He finally got a hosted server and the performance gains were immediate and obvious.

[RocketJedi]

There is one other pretty important component to this and it is the number of allowed connections. I didn't ask if this was a hosted server or one ran from home but that can make a huge difference. Business grade accounts have a very high number of allowed connections where private, home-based accounts have much less. You can see this when you torrent things. The torrent may not be coming in fast but if you are in a decent sized swarm and you are handshaked with good number of peers then your internet will feel all laggy. It doesn't matter if you have a 100MB home connection if your ISP throttles down the number of connections. Hitman went through this, his server performance was unacceptable with his MH server because it was so popular (but ran from home). He finally got a hosted server and the performance gains were immediate and obvious.

unless you have fiber to the home then it wont matter.

[JackGriffin]

Not true. No matter the connection type the ISP can throttle allowed connections and they very often (if not mostly) do. Dig deep into the TOS for your ISP and you'll almost surely find small print saying you will not run any type of server (game, ftp, etc) from home. This is almost never enforced but it allows the ISP to cap allowed connections per client legally.

[Feralidragon]

unless you have fiber to the home then it wont matter.

I happen to have fiber to the router itself by one of the best companies in Europe and I sure you they still limit the connections. Best example is like Jack said: torrents.
If I don't limit the number of connections myself, the whole connection is affected.

I have around 30Mb of bandwidth btw, and I never used such value for anything.

[Dr.Flay]

What ISPs do not tell you.
Whatever your type of account, the bandwidth issue is the ratio.
eg. in the UK, home accounts are a ratio of 50:1
Business accounts have a ratio of 20:1

The quoted maximum bandwidth for your account, is shared between you and another 49 (home) or 19 (business) users.

As stated you see the same effect in all p2p software (not just torrents).

Since WindowsXP, windows has not been a good OS for multiple connections (You can patch the registry to fix this)
The OS can make a big impact on performance, and a dedicated server should be setup differently from a PC you use normaly.
The tweak tool "Cacheman" has a useful profile for game servers.
You need larger RAM and disc caches, and certain widows services disabled.

There are many variables that make this cake. The best you can do is test everything individually so you can spot your weak-link.
Here are some free tools for checking/tweaking your connection.
http://my.opera.com/Unreal-Tournament/b ... rnet-tools
I find it useful to tweak my settings based on my actual average speed, not the quoted maximum.

Even your NIC will affect the speed. If you test your connection and it is error-free, you can disable the error-checking on the network card.
A good network card will have a good GUI and allow fine-tuning.