Steam games stutter/will not run from home server

[Canosgmk]

Hello, 

 

I built my 1st home server with leftover parts and some good hard drives. 

 

Right now, I am trying to get my steam games to be installed on the server so I can free up my 1TB SSD in the gaming PC.  

 

City Skylines doesn't have an issue running. 

Magic the Gathering does stutter, but doesn't crash. 

PUB G just will not run at all.  No errors, just doesn't run.  

- i stopped moving games over at this point -.

 

After two months googling, I can't find anyone in the situation I am in.  

 

Please offer some advise where I am going wrong. 

 

Server:

OS: TrueNAS Scale

CPU: AMD Phenom II, X4 955 4 core

Ram: 16GB (two sticks) Services- 12.2GiB, ZFS Cache 2GiB, Free 1.3GiB

Storage: 24.4 TiB free space (iron wolf - 7200 rpm)

Network: 1000Mb/s twisted pair to 1gb switch. 

No GPU used for hardware acceleration (MOBO can't support it.  if I upgrade, planning on intel A770) 

IP Address:  Nope.  you don't get that.

 

Steam is talking to the server by "Z:" drive. I have a "SteamLibrary" folder and a "GAMES" folder.  PUB G is in the steam library folder/steamapps/common

 

I am super noob at servers, so please include youtube video or clear instructions where I went wrong. 

[Needfuldoer]

20 minutes ago, Canosgmk said:

Steam is talking to the server by "Z:" drive. I have a "SteamLibrary" folder and a "GAMES" folder.  PUB G is in the steam library folder/steamapps/common

It's really not a good idea to set it up this way, because performance issues are inevitable. Storing your game files on an SMB share and accessing them across the network is creating a huge amount of latency and a roughly 100 MB/sec transfer speed bottleneck in comparison to local storage. 

 

The best way to do this is to set up iSCSI and access it over a 10 gig connection. Even then, you only really reap benefits if you have multiple client machines with overlapping Steam libraries, because you can set up deduplication on the NAS.

 

I recommend installing your games on local storage, and storing the files for games you're not currently playing on the NAS. (100 MB/sec is a lot faster than downloading everything over the Internet again.) If you want to get really fancy, you can set up a caching service on the NAS so you don't have to shuffle files manually:

 

 

[Canosgmk]

Long story short, ran in to a massive issue with my truenas scale system cause i had to update to Bluefin.  Which in turn means i have to reinstall ALL apps.  Being a noob at coding and understanding, I am limping away at learning how to backup the datasets for each app, install new, and reinstall the old datasets.  

Anyway, for this issue that brought me down this rabbit hole lined in peanut butter...  

 

You gave three great examples of how to run games from the NAS (storage movement)

my home setup is a 1GB network card, to a 10gb switch to a router.  The NAS does have a duel 1GB network pcie card in it (currently, one line going to the switch only).

 

If i do the iSCSI, i will need to buy a new pcie 10GB network card, Cat6E or better cable, and another 10GB Network card for the NAS? (i have: Realtek RTL8111H-CG/RTL8111HS-CG 10/100/1000M Ethernet controller in my B550-pro mobo)

my goal, from watching and reading is to have all the games on the NAS and stay updated automatically.  then when I am ready to play them, i just "install" or "move" them to my gaming PC.  

Which if the above options is best for my hardware i currently have.  or, is this not worth the squeeze unless im willing to upgrade the hardware in the NAS and Gaming PC. 

[Needfuldoer]

5 hours ago, Canosgmk said:

my goal, from watching and reading is to have all the games on the NAS and stay updated automatically.  then when I am ready to play them, i just "install" or "move" them to my gaming PC.  

Which if the above options is best for my hardware i currently have.  or, is this not worth the squeeze unless im willing to upgrade the hardware in the NAS and Gaming PC. 

 

Steam supports peer-to-peer file transfers over the LAN. You could run a Linux VM on your NAS that always has a copy of Steam logged in with your games installed, then when you install them from another PC it should copy at LAN speeds.

 

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/46BD-6BA8-B012-CE43

 

This is just my theory though, I haven't (yet) tried it in practice.