Launching even more Server CPU!

Updates Announcements
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Hi Creators! :waving_hand:

We’re excited to announce a major upgrade to how server CPU is allocated to your experiences! Last year, we made server memory dynamic, and this year we’re doing the same for your server CPU.

Starting on November 10th, we’re moving away from a single, static resource limit and replacing it with a new system that dynamically adjusts your server CPU based on the real-time number of players in your experience. This ensures your experiences allocated performance reflects its true needs. We expect this roll out to be completed by November 12th. This update will be automatically applied to all experiences.

What is the change and how does it work?

The previous approach had a fixed CPU allocation based on Max Players but blind to how many players were actually connected. This meant even as more players joined, you had the same amount of CPU. Soon, two things will happen:

  1. Increased Baseline: We are increasing the baseline CPU available to you.
  2. Automatic Scaling: As players join and leave your experience, we will automatically adjust your CPU allocation to match.

We are intentionally not sharing the precise formula as, unlike memory, the formula varies based on the type of CPU in the server your experience is running on. It is optimized so that you always receive the same effective compute resources, regardless of the underlying hardware. In our testing, we consistently saw experiences perform better than they do today.

Generally, the increased CPU per player should be seamless for most creators. However, if you’re explicitly building systems that scale based on the number of connected players you should double check your assumptions.

We recognize that a “behind-the-scenes” change like this can be difficult to test and benchmark on your own. However, if you notice any negative impact to your server performance, please leave a comment below. Additionally, for performance optimization best practices we have documentation here.

Thanks!

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This topic was automatically opened after 11 minutes.

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Hello, I have multiple questions regarding this change:

  1. Is it guaranted that server performance wont decrease due to this change?

  2. How much did the performance average increase in your testing?

  3. Will we see such a change for network performance? Especially for high player count experiences and experiences using Streaming?

  4. Will experiences that use the upcoming Server Authority feature be granted extra resources due to the feature’s nature?

Thanks for taking your time! :slightly_smiling_face:

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Very nice to hear we’re getting better server performance

When you say our CPU is being adjusted, are you talking about allocating more cores, or having the same amount of cores but on a more powerful processor?

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In our testing, we consistently saw experiences perform better than they do today.

-In your testing, did you see any instance of an experience performing worse?

-Are games with 1 or 2 players going to have less server CPU than they were previously?

-Why not add an API that allows us to know what level of server CPU is being supplied? especially since it can vary so much.

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Thanks for the question. The same processors but optimized to give you more cores/compute.

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Is the adjustment on a per-server or per-experience basis?

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The configuration change is being applied to all datacenters and therefore all instances/experiences.

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Does this apply to cloud instances when roblox exceeds baseline?
Such as the current offloading to AWS and other potential future providers?

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Awesome, more perfomance, games will crass less often. And I have a question somewhat related to this, are we getting more than 1 core CPU usage on Roblox client? :slight_smile:

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Will this CPU capacity switching impact our analytics?

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Does this have any effect on the cores allocated for Parallel Luau? Last I’ve heard it was hard capped at 3 due to concerns of cache thrashing.

Or should we consider this cap an unfortunate limitation that’ll stay around for the foreseeable future?

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this’ll be great for the giant conglomerate gamesexperiences, should hopefully make them a bit smoother.

Perchance have you looked into why some servers keep having giant ping spikes(we’re talking like 20K+ spikes)? (I know it’s probably a different part of the team, but thought I’d ask anyway)

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man, cmon, move on, don’t mention them removing experience chat, it sucks, we know, but is this related to this? no. literally 2 different teams are behind experience chat engineers and server engineers.

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Correct. This configuration applies everywhere to ensure you are getting the compute you need.

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This sounds like logic-heavy games, such as tower defense games, might take a big performance hit as individual servers typically have only 1 to 4 people max, and these games need as much CPU as they can get, even after all the optimizations they put into place.
This leads me to ask, will these servers be negatively affected due to individually-low player counts? Or is it purely based on the total players in the experience as a whole?

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Shouldn’t CPU be allocated by demand, rather than how many players there are in the game?
For example a donation game has many players but needs little CPU. On the other hand a FPS game needs more CPU but has a lower player count (<20).
In this case CPU would be allocated to the donation game, even though it doesn’t actually need it whereas the FPS game does.

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It’s on an per instance basis, and from our testing and telemetry we don’t believe any other experience with 1-2 players has received less server CPU or throttling than before. However if you do notice anything as the change happens, please don’t hesitate to reach back out to us so we can investigate.

We will also be monitoring our metrics during and after launch to ensure the roll out aligns with our testing.

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  1. Does this count for EVERY server? Even those with 50+ player limits?
  2. Why not make CPU allocation by-demand, like Hounx mentioned?
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Is it based on total CCU count or per-server based on amount of players they hold or a mix of both?

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