Alright. I came here, well, because I could use an ‘experts’ opinion.
Currently, we have:
Dual AMD Athlon MP 2800+ (2133Mhz) - 1 GB Ram - 74 GB HD-Space.
Would a:
AMD 64-bit (3.2Ghz)
2GB of PC3200 RAM
200GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
Make a noticable in how the server is run?
Currently, we are running ETPub 6.0.2 (no release past that can run without serious lag) on a 60+4 slot server.
I suspect that with a 64 player game your main problem is rate limiting. The way ET works, you get an effective maximum rate of around 25000 and with 64 players you are likely to hit that frequently. The more spammy features you have turned on, the more this will happen. Setting sv_maxrate and rate higher doesn’t actually help, because ET will send at most one roughly Ethernet MTU size packet per server frame to each player.
You can check CPU usage using the tools provided with your OS. Since the ET server is single threaded, you aren’t getting much benefit from 2 CPUs, and one processor hitting 100% for extended periods would be an indication that you need more. There may be OS level tweaks you can do to improve performance, but your first step is to figure out exactly where the bottleneck is.