Gaming server capacity

[MM983]

I was just curious about the possible scenarios with the server specs listed below..

Dual Xeons at 2.8ghz
1GB DDR Ram
7200-10000RPM hard drive
Decent colocation


Would it be possible to be running Source DS as well as another game or two on the same server?

[*E|M|F*wArgOd]

provided your host is not running a bunch of stuff unrelated to the games and you do have a big pipe to the internet backbone....

1GB Ram will get you ten 24 player slot srcds servers running counter-strike: source or equivalent well behaving game.

Your monthly data transfer will be between 1000GB and 2000GB if you run popular servers.

hl2mp is not well-behaved. i discontinued running them.

the maps you select are critical. so far I had to remove he_tennis and de_drought due to highly unstable fps specific to those maps.

[MM983]

Wow... excellent reply. Thank you. This is just a "what-if". I wanted to build this server, and it proves to be costly... especially going with a 1U and with dual Xeons, the price of a mobo goes up 2x.

I would invest the cost if I could run multiple [different] games. Such as a CS:S server, possibly a UTwhatever server, etc.

According to the webpage, I would receiver "One Megabit (1,024 kilobits) per second in bandwidth". Which I believe works out to be roughly 400GB a month in possible transfer.

Just curious on what else I could possibly do to cut costs down though. What would my possibilty be if I cut it down to a single P4 or Xeon processor with 1GB of DDR?

[*E|M|F*wArgOd]

find a good hosting company and enter a one year agreement to lock the monthly price in and "outsource" the server by way of a dedicated server rental.

Not a virtual server, a dedicated dual xeon server.

Your monthly data transfer should be around 2000GB if you get the right deal. The nic in the server will be a 100mbps or better card, not a 1mbps card.

Your server config must be configured for optimal performance. This means you will set your sv_maxrate to 8192 or less. There is no justification for allowing runaway bandwith usage.

As you can see in the metrics below a 1Mbps connection is not satisfactory for 10 servers running hot and full...


Report Name: Daily Report
(2004-12-04 21:11:03 - 2004-12-05 21:11:03)

TO_INTERNET
Max: 10.88 Mbits/s
Avg: 3.28 Mbits/s
Cur: 3.60 Mbits/s
Total: 34.7 G

FROM_INTERNET
Max: 2.00 Mbits/s
Avg: 1.25 Mbits/s
Cur: 1.35 Mbits/s
Total: 13.2 G

TOTAL
Max: 12.88 Mbits/s
Avg: 4.53 Mbits/s
Cur: 4.94 Mbits/s
Total: 47.9 G

At least a 10Mbps nic is required since the average rate of transfer is near 5Mbps. A 10Mbps card would have clamped the burst that occurred to 12Mbps. These bursts are associated with autodownload which does not, as rumored, affect gameplay provided the web site ip is standalone and you have the required high bandwidth connection.

Note: transfer in excess of 65GB per day will exceed the 2000GB monthly limit so this is the kind of number to alert on and tweak down the maxrate.

sv_maxrate of 8192 is good for a constant load of 100 players.

sv_maxrate of 4098 is good for a constant load of 200 players.

Half way between the above settings, 6144, will provide excellent performance for a constant load of 150 players with your CPU array remaining below 20%.

But your servers are unlikely to remain full all day so the 8192 is probably good as long as you watch your monthly data transfer numbers.

Run bad maps and your metrics will go bad in a heartbeat.