Arma 3 Low Server FPS

Technical Support
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1

OS Name/Version: Ubuntu 22.04

Product Name/Version: 2.6.0.12 - 20250214.1

Problem Description:

Completely vanilla Arma 3 game servers are presenting as if they are ‘overloaded’ as Bohemia documentation describes. Server FPS is below 20, sometimes as low as 1 and the server is automatically attempting to utilize all allocated CPU cores to try and catch up. I do not see any noteworthy error messages and have attempted to optimize server performance by modifying the basic.cfg file for Networking Optimization. Players have decent fps but low server fps causes AI to stutter and lag.

Steps to reproduce:

  • Step 1: Create default Arma 3 Instance with recommended specs
  • Step 2: Set Admin Password in configuration>Arma 3 to allow admin controls
  • Step 3: Connect to server and login as admin. (Use #monitor for server data in game.)

Actions taken to resolve so far:
Created multiple instances to attempt to isolate any configurations I neglected to isolate.
Modified MaxMsgSend and MinBandwidth variables in basic.cfg as per Basic Server Config File – Arma 3 - Bohemia Interactive Community?

2

I think I’m experiencing a similar issue. I couldn’t narrow it down to server FPS since as the CPU utilisation wasn’t hitting critical limits and headless clients made no difference. I had no luck in finding anything that makes a noticeable difference unfortunately. What hardware are you running?

3
  • CPU: Ryzen 7950X
  • RAM: 192GB of DDR5 at 6000MHz
  • Storage: 2x4TB Samsung 990 Evo Plus NVMe M.2 SSD (In Raid 1 configuration for redundancy)

This machine is currently in a data center.

4

Oh damn. That’s a lot newer and higher end than mine. I was hoping I’d resolve my issue with more/faster ram but judging by yours, I guess my issue will remain. I read somewhere that Arma doesn’t like virtualised environments but I have no real means to test it outside of at least an LXC container from proxmox :thinking:

5

Yeah, I’m fairly certain that it must be a bug somewhere because the server is IMMEDIATELY bogged down when the mission is rendered.

For clarification, Server CPU usage and Server FPS are normal when:
-Starting
-Player connecting
-Player selecting mission
-Player selecting slots for mission file
-Viewing the map and clicking continue to begin mission

Then, after selecting ‘Continue’ the server immediately jumps to 4 CPU cores all being utilized 100% and server FPS drops from 50 to 20 (Tops). Then when I put an AI down, it drops further to maybe 3FPS.

This is not normal, the game came out in 2013. I hope someone can help us both.

6

Fascinating. I’ll have to do further testing in the coming days on that. I’ve been a bit bogged down with work. For me I was seeing cpu utilisation of up to about 70% on 6 cores. To be fair those are old Broadwell cores (2x Xeon 2680 v4) but yea. Ram stayed under 2Gb the whole time. Have you tried running it outside of docker? I had a very small uplift then.

7

So ive done more testing and yes, its low server FPS. I just do not understand why tho. It seems to cause a huge amount of server load for no particular reason.

8

When we ran the server outside of docker and observed improved performance. Also added headless clients. However, the server is slowly degrading in performance over time. We are upgrading CPU soon and hoping for the best.

9

For future searches, the solution was to set the cpu count parameter on the server
eg:
-cpuCount=8

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