server hardware

(ouroboro) #1

could someone please help me understand how much hardware a game server needs? for example ET - how does one determine the CPU power needed? does it go up with player slots? and RAM as well. and is a fast HDD necessary?

how low-end can one get away with and still have a satisfactory experience?

what about newer games? D3 for example? and although this is the wrong place, what about Valve games (if you know)? Source vs HL1?

i am very confused as to how much box one really needs for a dedicated server. i’ve considered renting a box, but i’m on the tightest of budgets so i need to know if the typical low budget boxes could handle life as a game server.

here’s an example machine offered by one provider:

Intel Celeron 1.3 GHz
512 RAM
60 GB Hard Drive

there’s no details regarding type of RAM or HDD, but i’ll assume the worst (let’s say PC2100 and 5400 RPM). would that box run a 12-14 man ET server? D3 (specifically Q4)?

could such a box run servers for multiple games? would it only handle one game at a time, and the others would have to be empty or all would suffer performance problems?

if there are any sort of formulas one can use to calculate these needs, please do share them. i’d appreciate it greatly

thanks

(ParanoiD) #2

I dont know much about it as well.

  1. U said the rram would be probably PC2100. I gues it is just the slow old SD-RAM running on 100 MHz…
  2. A celeron is the budget processor of Intel and therefore will be slower then a pentium or AMD compareable. I think it would be probably too slow, but i am not sure.

One thing, my clan once had a serverr running at one of our members who offered us a server at his home. The connection was probably too slow why we got some lag but it was still playable… That spec was about this:
AMD Athlon 1600+
512 MB DDR 266MHz

Maybe the system u mentioned is good enough, but i dont know what caused our lag, the connection or the pc…

Still one idea: We later rented a server at http://www.i3d.nl (its a dutch site). They are pretty cheap, one of teh cheapest we found on the net. They are good and I ping on a distance of 200Km from teh server <50 like most other europeans do. Americans also get pretty good pings as well. They have good servers like Intel XEON, a real server proc.

(kamikazee) #3

Our old server (a dedicated Free BSD box) could serve 12 playerslots. I believe it was an AMD 1700 with 512 MB memory and the memory was the limitting factor since it ran a few websites as well. Note that this wasn’t a home-made computer but a rented one, so it had a good connection.

If you want to run a server from you at home, you’d better have a good connection usable for hosting servers (like SDSL). Those cost more, of course.
The Internet connection was allmost allways the problem with home-served game servers, not the hardware.

(DG) #4

If you’re on a budget, at least in UK the way to go is to rent the actual game server, not the server box. Serious game hosts typically have a bunch of dual Xeon, or at worst P4 machines, running multiple games on the one machine. I simply wouldnt have a gameserver running a celery or duron, but then i’m of the mind that there’s no point to a gameserver if quality isnt paramount.

The thought of a gameserver being on the same box as a website is a bit odd, websites have different requirements, do not need class 1 bandwidth like a gameserver really should have, and are prone to extreme variations in resource usage.

Expect Quake4 server to have far higher requirements per player.

(ouroboro) #5

yes, this would be a rented box from some provider, not at my home. i wanted an entire box so i can have free reign to do other things, not just run game servers. so even though it’s not ideal to run games, websites, etc on the same box, that’s what i’d be wanting. i don’t expect ideal performance, but i want to know if a cheap server like i posted could handle light use as a game server (ET matches/scrims for example). or would everybody have a horrible time and be whining from noticeable bad performance?

i really want to know how the heck you go about calculating CPU needs, for example, not bandwidth. i can figure out bandwidth needs but CPU/RAM etc is confusing.

(kamikazee) #6

Note that if you rent such a box, most of the time you need to administer it remotely yourself.
Our admin has got trouble to keep lag down as much as possible, but he’s tweaking the hardware and OS settings.
After upgrading the server, it was mostly the RAM that improved lag, seems the old one ‘swapped’ too much.

(Nail) #7

from the manual

To run a Dedicated server, we suggest you have at least:

· Intel® Pentium® IV 1.3ghz processor or equivalent
ET needs about 30 MHz dedicated to the ET process per player slot. Here is a table with suggested server speeds based upon maximum client settings.

o For a 32 player dedicated server, ET will need 1ghz.

o For a 16 player dedicated server, ET will need 500mhz.

o For an 8 player dedicated server, ET will need 250mhz.

(SCDS_reyalP) #8

The CPU requirements of ET are fairly modest. You might want a bit more than what the manual suggests for smooth gameplay, but even 1.3 celeron should have no trouble with 16 players.

It’s worth noting that the CPU required per player depend a great deal on 1) the complexity of the map 2) the FPS of the players.

I have constructed a map where a single player on the server getting 50+fps would completely overload 1.4ghz athlon, to the point the game was unplayable :moo:

(ouroboro) #9

rofl @ Nail, you owned me again :frowning: i guess they say RTFM for a reason. i deleted that folder from my game - bad on me. thanks.

reyalP, can you explain how players’ fps matters? i thought the server only sent out 20 fps so i’m not understanding how that would matter.

but thanks for giving the green light to the 1.3 celery, if you say it’s enough that’s all i need to hear :slight_smile:

(SCDS_reyalP) #10

The server runs client commands at their own frame rate, not sv_fps. If this wasn’t true, client FPS couldn’t affect recoil, jumping etc on the server. (and FWIW, maxpackets doesn’t affect this, you just get multiple commands packed into one packet. The size of client->server packets is so small that a significant portion is overhead, so lower maxpackets still uses quite a bit less bandwidth. There’s also more opportunity for compression, although I haven’t looked into how that is or isn’t used.)

Oh and going back to your original post, I’d say (based on what I’ve heard from server admins) that box will NOT run a decent D3 or Q4 server, for any number of players.

(mortis) #11

Personally, I would stay away from all Celerons and Durons for a variety of reasons including slow bus speeds and a low number of operations per cycle. A 1.3 Celeron probably only has the crunching power of ~700-800 Mhz Pentium 3, at best. As discussed in detail in the etpro forums, memory usage isn’t so much of an issue, although obviously more is better.

Faster P3s, Athlons, P4s, Athlon64s, Opterons and Xeons are the chips you want to see in a server. I’ve set up a variety of LAN servers, and I can tell you that my Athlon 1600+ ded server could run circles around the 1.2Ghz Dell Celeron that I have. In fact, I could run two 16 man Wolfy servers on the 1600+ Athlon with better performance than the Celeron 1.2 Ghz. My main system, a 3000+ Athlon with 1GB of PC3200, will nicely host 2 Wolfy Lan servers and a UT server without breaking a sweat. Just looking at the task manager when the machine is under load will help you guage your system’s hosting potential.

(ouroboro) #12

thanks very much, folks :slight_smile:

(DG) #13

I expanded a bit on the documentation server requirements, though it’s looking a little dated.

(petameta) #14

I wonder why recent games need as much CPU/RAM as they do. I remember that I could easily run a Quakeworld dedicated server on a Pentium 75 with 32 MB RAM (Linux). Sure, Quake 1 is quite old. But what do the newer games do more than Quake 1 had to do ? I mean, a dedicated server doesn’t have to render any graphics, just manage player data. This is basically the same it does for Quake 1 and for Enemy Territory.

So: Where do all those CPU Cycles and Megabytes of RAM go ? For example, what does an ET dedicated server do that Quake 1 didn’t do (and so needs more CPU cycles) ?

(kamikazee) #15

Quite a lot of things eating up CPU cycles I think:
Scripting, serious entities flying around, collision checking, more players…

BTW: Doom3 had polygon hit checking. No wonder it takes more load.