LXC and TeamSpeak

Aonoa · Guru Joined: 23 May 2002 Posts: 538 Location: Oslo, Norway

Hello,

I have been using LXC and Linux containers for some time to have multiple "servers" on my one physical server. Apache, samba, postfix and some other things are working excellently in these, kind of "chrooted" servers. However, TeamSpeak is lagging and having latency problems for no particular reason at all, even if it's only me and one other person both connected to the same local network it will still lag a lot. Either of us may say something, then there is a little delay and it sent to the other end, and randomly parts of what was said might or might not be left out.

The network interface eth0 is bridged to br0 and LXC uses that to create further virtual interfaces, giving each "chrooted" server their own interface and IP. There has to be something that causes this strange TeamSpeak behaviour. If I start an exact copy of the TeamSpeak setup on a laptop on the same local network, it will run without lag or network latency issues. The laptop would be running OSX, though, unfortunately. I don't have another Gentoo system to try it on at the moment, which is a shame because that could have helped pinpoint LXC as the culprit somehow.

I was wondering if anyone has some thoughts or experiences regarding this.

Thank you for reading.
_________________
Te audire no possum.
Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.

"I can't hear you."
"I have a banana in my ear."

miket · Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 8:09 pm Post subject:

I don't use TeamSpeak myself, but I do have happy experience with LXC. When I talked with one of the Network Operations people at work about putting various servers into LXC guests, he suggested that instead of putting ntpd in a guest as I planned that I put it instead directly on the host. He said it's small but is sensitive to timing issues.

Running ntpd directly on the host works out all right as does an X server running a small WM (Openbox). Alas, TeamSpeak, while it may also be timing-sensitive, looks more like a gorilla you'd want to run in a guest. Maybe you could try biting the bullet and put teamspeak-server-bin directly on the host and see how it works.

Umm--binary package, hard masked, no source, closed license. Small wonder you're trying this in a sandboxed environment! Maybe you could try running this in a chroot on the host side. You must want this badly.

miket · Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 8:10 pm Post subject:

I don't use TeamSpeak myself, but I do have happy experience with LXC. When I talked with one of the Network Operations people at work about putting various servers into LXC guests, he suggested that instead of putting ntpd in a guest as I planned that I put it instead directly on the host. He said it's small but is sensitive to timing issues.

Running ntpd directly on the host works out all right as does an X server running a small WM (Openbox). Alas, TeamSpeak, while it may also be timing-sensitive, looks more like a gorilla you'd want to run in a guest. Maybe you could try biting the bullet and put teamspeak-server-bin directly on the host and see how it works.

Umm--binary package, hard masked, no source, closed license. Small wonder you're trying this in a sandboxed environment! Maybe you could try running this in a chroot on the host side. You must want this badly.

Aonoa · Guru Joined: 23 May 2002 Posts: 538 Location: Oslo, Norway

Thank you for your reply. :-)

Yes, besides this issue with TeamSpeak, I am very happy with LXC too. I used to use Xen, but I like LXC a lot better. TeamSpeak is for a gaming community I am part of, and it's widely used among gamers. I tried using murmur/mumble instead, which was better for some, but I think a lot of our members found it more difficult to setup the mumble client and preferred to go on TeamSpeak.

I do not want to run teamspeak directly on the host, though. I have moved it to another system, and if I can't make it work within a LXC container, then I will just keep it on another system entirely. Hmm. Perhaps I will try putting murmur on that system without LXC as well, just to see if the members that had issues with sound could have been related to LXC timing, and not poor client configurations.
_________________
Te audire no possum.
Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.

"I can't hear you."
"I have a banana in my ear."