Fox3 Just Squeezed 30-40 % More Speed Out of Your Fox3 Server Loads

Luck
May 14
4 min read

(A peek under the hood at our new performance architecture)

TL;DR – We swapped the way we share the gigantic DCS installation from NFS to SMB 3.1.1 across our 10 Gb backplane. Mission loads now finish 10–20 seconds faster on average (about a 30-40 % improvement), while the backend chews up less CPU and storage. Same hardware, better experience, lower cost—everybody wins.

The Storage Elephant in the Room

Full-fat DCS install today: ~590 GB once you’ve got every terrain map, aircraft module, and asset pack.
Headroom for the next mega-patch: We reserve 700 GB per install so we can absorb those 100 GB quarterly updates without drama.

Now multiply that by 300+ customer environments and you’re looking at nearly 200 TB of NVMe if each VM kept its own copy. At cloud prices that’s…impossible.. 🍣

Our “Master / Client” Architecture

Instead of cloning 300 installs, we keep a handful of Master nodes:

Master machines hold the single golden copy of DCS on blisteringly fast NVMe.
Client machines mount that copy over our isolated 10 Gb backplane.
When a patch drops, we update the Masters once, invalidate caches, and everybody’s on the new build within minutes.

That scheme has saved six figures in storage over the years, but there’s a trade-off: the first time a mission loads, your client has to slurp maybe a gigabyte or two over the wire. Historically that meant ~55 s mission load times, which is fine for a headless server but still felt pokey to us.

NFS Was Good—SMB Is Better (for Us) (Nerd Stuff Sorry)

We’ve flogged both protocols for four years. Here’s why SMB 3.1.1 finally beat out NFS 4.1 in our lab:

What We Measured	NFS 4.1	SMB 3.1.1 (Multichannel)	Why It Matters
Sequential read throughput (DiskSpd, 1 GB/s theoretical link)	6.7 Gb/s	9.4 Gb/s	Copies big map files 40 % faster
CPU on Master during a 25 GB mission asset pull	18 %	11 %	Leaves cores free for other VMs
Client-side cache hit rate (first-run vs second-run)	72 %	90 %	SMB’s smarter oplocks keep more files resident
Wire encryption	Kerberos optional, but adds latency	AES-128-GCM built-in, negligible cost on modern CPUs	Secure and fast

SMB’s Multichannel splits traffic across multiple TCP streams that line up with the NIC’s receive queues. Add a touch of RDMA off-load on the Masters, and suddenly we’re saturating the link at half the CPU. (in our environment this does not actually go over a NIC so it is faster)

What Happened This Week

Monday & Tuesday (May 12–13): We migrated every Master node from NFS exports to SMB shares during the daily 04:00 UTC maintenance window.
Ran side-by-side validation: mission checksums, asset integrity, anti-cheat approvals—all clean.
Flipped the mount script on Clients; they now auto-retry an SMB path first, fall back to NFS only if you’re on one of our legacy low-bandwidth sites (11 customers left—scheduled next).

What You Will Notice

Before (NFS)	After (SMB)	Delta
Mission load (Cold cache, heavy Syria map) – average	45 s	28 s
Mission load (Warm cache)	14 s	9 s
Server CPU spikes when two missions boot together	75 %	48 %

Is shaving 10-20-ish seconds life-changing? Maybe not—but string that across every restart, every map change, every campaign hop, and it adds up. Plus the extra CPU breathing room means a lower chance of lag spikes when DCS decides to re-optimize shaders mid-mission (you know the ones).

Why This Matters for the Fox3 Customers

Faster patch day turnarounds – We update the Masters once; you’re ready to fly while other hosts are still waiting for SteamCMD to finish.
Lower costs, better performance – Less silicon to rent means we can keep your monthly rate below the “big cloud” guys that just YOLO-bill you for raw NVMe.
Future-proofed – If / when ED drops a 1 TB install (Öttocat, we see you 👀), we can absorb it without blinking—storage math still works.
Security baked in – SMB’s native encryption keeps those serialized Lua scripts (and your liveries) off the wire in plaintext.

What’s Next on the Roadmap?

Client-side prefetcher – We’re testing a smart service that watches the mission rotation and pulls the next map’s textures into RAM before you even request them.
RDMA to the edge – As 25 Gb becomes affordable we’ll light up SMB Direct on customer-facing NICs, aiming for sub-20 s cold boots.

Final Thoughts

Fox3’s whole reason to exist is to deliver the smoothest, quickest DCS experience on the planet without making you mortgage your HOTAS for server fees. Switching to SMB is one of those “boring infrastructure” wins that most folks will never notice—except you just loaded into Marianas in 28 seconds instead of 45 and thought, “Huh, that felt snappy.”

That’s the kind of nerdy victory that keeps us grinning. As always, ping us in Discord if you catch anything weird or just want to geek out about storage protocols (we do).

Fox3 is getting our nerd on, so you don't have to.

—Luck & the Fox3 Team