Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : Xen or OpenVZ for gameserver?

[That Guy]

I'm making an online puzzle game and I'm wondering which virtualization would handle it the best: OpenVZ or Xen and why. Thanks!

EDIT: Forgot the mention, the gameserver is written in Java.

[tsj5j]

Xen - because you can swap, and Java uses a ton of memory.

[tanfwc]

Yes, I vote for Xen as well

[rghf]

Xen would be better due to the way it reports the RAM to the system

[That Guy]

Thanks for the input guys! Looks like it's Xen, but out of curiosity, in which situations would OpenVZ be the better choice over Xen?

[thewird]

OpenVZ would not be better. With a gameserver you need consistent resources. Xen allocates ram to you and is not shared. It also has swap in case you need that too.

thewird

[tsj5j]

Originally Posted by Mike.

Thanks for the input guys! Looks like it's Xen, but out of curiosity, in which situations would OpenVZ be the better choice over Xen?

Actually Xen is better than OpenVZ in most aspects.

The only weaknesses are that Xen is actually a higher level of virtualization (which was meant to be a good thing), but will cause a slightly longer delay.
However, this delay really isn't felt much and isn't much of a problem.

Some quote Burst RAM as OpenVZ's strength, but it is fluctuating and may not always be reliable (and once you run out of RAM and Burst RAM cannot be allocated, your application will be killed), whereas Xen's swap will always be there for you, slowing your application abit but ensuring it stays up.

[YYamagishi]

Since you don't want your process killed, I would vote for XEN