Server Help Dedicated server lag problems

Hey guys

Me and a few friend just started playing Starbound and we love it. However, I have my own server on which I have downloaded Steam, installed and ran the dedicated server on. Since this is the same Steam account I play the game with too, I put the server in offline mode and it has ran continually for a week now.

Our problem is that we're struggling with lag. It's not a matter of weak PCs. FPS is high and nice for all of us, but we're all experiencing the same little amount of lag all the time (even I who have the server in my own LAN, the others connect via their internet connections). Very often it's bigger spikes. This makes especially combat very hard because an enemy can move from 20 meters away and right up to your face in one "animation" (in lack of a good word). I'd like to be able to explain this even better, but it really feels like any other online game where you can see something/someone moving in a direction and then all of sudden see it jump to another place because either him or you had what I would call a lag spike.

It's a DELL Server with a pretty strong Xeon CPU and 8GB of RAM, so I doubt the issues we're having is because of that. My connection is a 70/70 fiber optics with a typical of 8-10 ping so that shouldn't be the issue either. The server is running Server 2012 RS OS if that matters. I should also mention that we did have about exactly the same issue with Terraria a few years ago. That too was run on a dedicated server (not the same HW though). Didn't find a solution for it back then...

I really don't know where to start my troubleshooting on this. Normally I would go looking for network issues, but since I have the problem locally with NPC's I figured that is probably not the issue. Hoping for some good advice here. Thanks in advance.

 

Just wanted to note that you don't need steam running, at all. Just run the server software directly from the install folder. The game has absolutly no DRM. The only time you need steam is for updating. Whioch you could just transfer from your main computer since it will be updating anyway. So Steam doesn't even need to be installed on the server.

Check your hardware useage while the server is running and active. See if where the spikes are happening. The hard drives, the CPU, etc.