Hello.

Well, what I'll talk about is regarding some strangest of the happenings. I have a VPS from Providerservice.com and I am their customer for over a year now. They've been great throughout the year. They had awesome support and awesome Network quality.


I Host GameServers and since the last month, my Servers have been giving big lag jerks to all the clients connected. Like one big lag jerk every 5 minutes. When such a thing happens, the first thing I usually check is the Network. From 10 different machines, I did MTR traceroutes and there was not even a single packet that was lost so I was sure that the Network is not causing it. I observed my CPU usage, RAM usage, HDD usage and everything was normal but GameServers still lagged. Now today, I reloaded a complete new Debian OS and copied the Game Server files exactly from my other machines. There was no extra program or software installed on the server, but that didn't help remove the Lag. So now I'm sure its not my VPS that causes it.

Such a thing happened with me before. No Network packets were being lost and my VPS showed CPU/Ram/HDD to be normal. I asked my Provider and they said one of our user is spiking the CPU with a large number of SQL queries and that's why your lagging. But I talked to this company, they've checked their Host machine and they see nothing wrong with it. According to them, everything is normal at the Host machine. So we are short of ideas on what to do and that's why I'm here to take some expert opinions, the following things are for sure :

-> My Game Server files are exactly as I run on other machines without Lag and even on the current machine 1 month ago without Lag.
-> The VPS itself is not causing the Lag.
-> I've checked Network and no packets are loss, not sure about any difference between ICMP or UDP packets since the game is UDP.

The most probable thing is the Host machine itself. This usually happens when the Game Server falls out of resources and gets stuck.

Well,
it seems to me that VPS is 'clogging' because of other VPSes running on the host machine,
which can be using the machine resources at top (then your VPS is having less resources available)
maybe that's a problem.

Do you know how many VPSes run on hosted server (let's assume it's VMware ESX virtualization) and if any are 'heavy users'(this info can only give you your provider) ?

I asked my provider to move me to another Stable VPS Host which they did and the lag is gone. I believe this was because of the Host machine now and a major thing could be Hard Disk I/O errors and access times of the Host. I tried that on my previous host and HDD speed was 70mb/s while on my new VPS at other host machine, the speed is around 200 mb/s which is quite of a difference and that explains why lag went away.

I hope it will stay like that.