Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : Is 4 gig ram enough? (and other hosting questions)

[micze]

Note: this is not a request for hosting offers, just general discussion about hardware and software pro's and con's

This is about hosting a game server for the game Minecraft so i dont know if this forum is alright to use, as experience with Minecraft is practically mandatory to understand what i would need.
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Hello, as many of you have experience with hosting and hardware i would value your input on a few questions if you don't mind

Currently hunting around for a new hosting as my cheap hazenet hosting was a disaster ^^ i underestimated minecraft resource usage greatly!

I have learned my lesson and take my loss as a man, i upped budget conciderably so don't tell me i already know i was stupid.

A few technical questions below: If you have any input i didn't cover below please do ^^

Do you think 4 gig ram is enough or do you reccomend more?

Also would a dualcore with a faster clockspeed be better then a quadcore?

Xeon or would consumer cpu's work just as well intel or amd in that case?

Is ramdisk for map storage worth it, or would dual SCSI 10k disks do?

How important is latency from the server to clients is 60-100ms good enough?

CentOS? or could i use Debian 5 or 6?

[leeware]

I have customers that are running pretty sizable mindcraft grids. The default configuration for all of the machines in the grids are with a minimum for 3GB+ to 4GB of RAM. I don't know for a fact how well it works but I assume it does as those customers have expanded quite a bit. As for clock speeds single / triples / quads without direct experience with the server application, it is hard to say. While I have tons of metric information on other games, I don't have anything on Mindcraft yet. Xeon vs consumer cpus, amd vs Intel? The professional in me says that the code executing on those chips wouldn't care or know the difference. Those are more personal preferences than anything else. RAM Disks/ HDD Storage configuration again hard to tell for this specific application. Latency, Operating system etc. The former would have to be based on real-world experiences and the later is a matter of personal choice.

Hope this helps.

[SeedBit]

It depends how many users you'll have online at any one time.

I'd say that 3-4GB RAM would be able to handle 50+ players fine. Maybe less if it's a really big world. As far as I know Minecraft doesn't make great use of multi cores/threads, so more power per core is much better than more cores with less power each iirc.

The next issue is disk i/o. Actions being logged, blocks being placed and removed, sending the client block data all require lots of i/o as the world is split into many small files. Consider storing the world files on a RAM disk and writing the log files to a RAM disk (of course backed up regularly to the hard disk via a cron job or something) or an SSD if you're really planning on having a big active server.

Then there's latency. Fighting mobs can be a little laggy with 100ms+ latency, but generally everything else isn't very latency dependent. For fighting mobs and PvP you're going to want less than 50ms ideally.

[funkywizard]

Originally Posted by micze

This is about hosting a game server for the game Minecraft so i dont know if this forum is alright to use, as experience with Minecraft is practically mandatory to understand what i would need.

Thanks for that background, it greatly helps answer your question. All my advice will assume you're running one copy of minecraft on one server, one world / instance or whatever. If you have more than one, just multiply my answers accordingly.

Originally Posted by micze

Do you think 4 gig ram is enough or do you reccomend more?

4gb should be enough. 1gb is kind of a minimum, 2gb generally should be enough, and 4gb should give you plenty of breathing room.

Originally Posted by micze

Also would a dualcore with a faster clockspeed be better then a quadcore?

Minecraft server is single threaded, so unless you're running many servers at once, a dual core with higher clock speed will be better than a quad core with lower clock speed

Xeon or would consumer cpu's work just as well intel or amd in that case?

i7 would work fine, so would xeon. Xeon has ECC memory and other features that the i7 doesn't, making it recommended in a number of areas, but for a minecraft server it shouldn't matter

Is ramdisk for map storage worth it, or would dual SCSI 10k disks do?

Not terribly familiar with the i/o needs of minecraft, sorry. For what it's worth, we don't see a whole lot of i/o on the vps customers we have who use minecraft, but I assume this would depend on what kind of maps are being loaded.

How important is latency from the server to clients is 60-100ms good enough?

Although I've heard of a number of performance problems with minecraft, I haven't heard anyone complain about network latency being a big deal, the way people in counterstrike would normally be very latency sensitive. Again, no expert in this area, but I don't see people complaining about latency a lot. Even in a high end FPS, 60ms is perfectly fine, so I would assume 60-100ms in minecraft would also work fine.

CentOS? or could i use Debian 5 or 6?

whatever you are most comfortable configuring or whatever your host is most comfortable supporting. I personally prefer centos, but I don't see why you couldn't use debian.

[NateN34]

Latency, is not that important. As long as your are not running 210+ ping.

RAM wise, 4 gigs could host around 30-40 ish, taking into account, that nothing else is on the server and you are not using a RAM disk. If you are using a RAM disk, which you HAVE TO in my opinion, since hdds are too dang slow, you could host 20-30ish. Do not underestimate Minecraft's ability to use RAM!

Disk wise, you will HAVE TO use a RAM disk, to avoid lag. Those two hdds are simply not fast enough for what Minecraft demands. Avoid SSD's, those things will die fast with Minecraft's writes to the disk, and they are simply smoked by RAM disks.

CPU usage. Minecraft can only utilize one core. So higher clock speed per core, the better. Also try to avoid HT. So faster dual core is by far better. Avoid single cores. You want that extra CPU to zip backups, run the incremental garbage collector and other background things. I would personally avoid I7 or any other HT based CPU's.

For the OS, it really doesn't matter. I run Debian on mine, and it works great.

[micze]

Thank you for the input.