Crowley

You are welcome. Regards, "I'll Just Stare" Crowley (hint: say it fast)

More disturbing than I thought...

Well, this is happening now. The higher ups asked for this, hehehe.

Well this is a thing...

For the record none of the server hosting or configuration is a secret, I mean I wrote a document on it. Also all the information can be referenced back to BI's wiki on dedicated servers and parameters pages.

It would not benefit the public server at this point in time. We only use the headless client for training and OP server workload distribution, I do not recommend it for the public server unless there are performance issues reported. What was really misunderstood was the usage of headless client vs the persistent parameter.

Correct, persistent headless client doesn't perform in the way you'd think. Persistent AI calculations is actually a parameter in the server config file, set to 0 or 1. When persistent=1, the server is always running the loaded map and AI run around all the time. When persistent=0, the server is always running but the map unloads and the AI offload until a player comes online. (this is our preferred setup) Some information for our readers: Headless Dedicated Server and Headless Client are almost identical in setup and usage but the misunderstood part is what they actually do. The Headless Dedicated Server (HDS) hosts the map, host transactions between clients/server, and CAN compute AI calculations by itself. Headless Client on the other hand acts as a client, using -client, that connects to the designated server to take over AI calculations, this is ONLY used to distribute the workload over multiple processors or cores depending on the usage. A headless client is only used when two conditions need to be met: When the HDS is having resource dependency issues while processing AI calculations. (ie, the HDS is maxing out on CPU usage as an application) and when hardware configuration allows for this style of setup. (ie, either a very powerful box or multiple boxes on the same LAN) I hope this helps in explaining the persistent parameter as well as the similarities and differences between Headless Dedicated Servers (HDS) and Headless Clients.

Also, all the mods we currently use that utilize call extensions will have to be updated accordingly before they work properly. Reference here under "for modders"

It won't actually change hardly any of the performance server side, simply allocate more memory per Arma server host which isn't a problem right meow. But, what this will do according the dev notes is allow Arma clients to allocate more memory beyond the recent cap of 3GB(1.66 dev note) on 64-bit capable computers. The dev even state quite clearly that FPS increase is probably not going to be a thing, so don't expect it. Stability, texture loading, and modpacks are the winners here.