Drek's HLDS / SRCDS rate calculator

This handy little chappy will calculate the recommended number of slots your HLDS or SRCDS server can run with rates, as recommended by Drek.

All calculations are directly from Drek's guidelines "running a lag free server", but since nobody can be bothered to read his highly useful and well structured advice, I have built this.

This script should work in IE/Opera/Firefox now. Thanks to pizzahut for help on getting it to work in Firefox.

Rates calculator
Application	Bandwidth
HLDS: GoldSrc engine games. SRCDS: Source engine games.	Enter your upload speed or download speed, whichever is smaller. kbps (kilo bits per second). Unsure? Take a speed test.
Hardware	Recommendation
MHz processor. MB of physical RAM. 0 player(s) max recommended. player(s) including reserved slots.	sv_minrate 0 sv_maxrate 0 sv_minupdaterate 0 sv_maxupdaterate 0
Still experiencing bad lag after using the recommended settings?
If you are still having problems with unusually high or unstable pings, lower your sv_maxupdaterate one at a time until your pings are stable and as low as they are going to be. You shouldn't have to lower it any further than half the number I gave above. If your pings are low and stable with a full server, try raising your sv_maxupdaterate one at a time until your pings go wonky, then lower it back to the last good number.

Not got a clue what to enter? Here's some help.

Application

Select the server application you are running.

HLDS (GoldSrc engine): This includes games such as Half-Life Deathmatch, Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Team Fortress Classic, Day of Defeat, Deathmatch Classic, Natural Selection, and Sven Co-op.
SRCDS (Source engine): This includes games such as Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source, and Fortress Forever.

Bandwidth

Simply the lowest amount of bandwidth you have available to the Internet. If your downstream speed is 4 megabits, and your upstream speed is 512 kilobits, enter 512.

If you honestly have no idea, try the speed test. Do 2 or 3 tests on the recommended testing server to get an accurate result, then take the lowest figure out of downstream/upstream and enter it in the box.

Hardware

We now need to know details about the server computer.

MHz of processor: How fast the server processor is in megahurtz (MHz). We do not care about dual or quad core processors, so do not multiply your speed by the number of cores your processor has.
MB of physical RAM: The amount of physical primary memory (RAM) the server has. Do not include virtual memory. 1 GB = 1024 MB, 2 GB = 2048 MB, etc.

Once you enter your server processor speed and total RAM, the script will recommend how many slots it can handle.

Either take the recommended slots and type it in the player(s) including reserved slots box, or type in your own figure.

Calculate

Once you've filled in the bandwidth and players, you can calculate the rates recommended for your server configuration file. Simply copy and paste the results in to your server.cfg file.

If you would prefer to have an application for Windows that does this, see my original creation of this tool.

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