SSD - To run Minecraft server on the drive, or just the worlds...

Discussion in 'Bukkit Discussion' started by fffizzz, Sep 21, 2011.

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  1. Offline

    fffizzz

    What will give the best performance?

    Ive been running my server off a regular HDD for the last few months. Everythings been great but my player base has skyrocketed lately, and i installed a SSD. Its been great, but im thinking I can tweak thinks further.

    Better to run minecraft on the HDD and worlds of the SDD? Or have it all on the SDD like I do now, with backups on the HDD...

    Opinions?
     
  2. Offline

    sukosevato

    All on the SSD with back ups to the HDD.

    No doubt about that.
     
  3. Offline

    Phaedrus

    The server files are pretty small compared to the world folder, so might as well put it on the SSD.
    Even better, if you have the ram to spare, put it all on a ram disk.
     
  4. Offline

    VicToMeyeZR

    I would put the OS on the SSD.. 300% faster yet. :)
     
  5. Offline

    fffizzz

    600 gig hdd
    60 gig Velocity SSD SaTa III drive

    So, Ill keep it the way it is. I actually have one of the worlds in a ramdisk, but might use two. I have 6 worlds on my server, and been averaging 60+ lately.
     
  6. Offline

    Lolmewn

    Throw those HDD's in the trash :p
     
  7. Offline

    Raycrash

    Anyone got a comparison how much better sdd's are in this field ?

    We are thinking of switching too if it is a noticable difference^^
     
  8. Offline

    fffizzz

    my users noticed a big difference when i moved everything to the ssd, even though no one had problems with lag before.
     
  9. Offline

    VicToMeyeZR

    If your running mulitple servers an SSD is always the way to go. (use HDD for the backups) if your runinng only one and have 2-4GB of extra ram, and ramdisk is of course way better.
     
  10. Offline

    nala3

    HDD
    [​IMG]



    SSD
    [​IMG]
     
  11. Offline

    Raycrash

    This seems an even better option....
    we got a world which is 3000blocks radius from 0/0 and it is just 500mb (though this grows with more "stuff" in it right ?)

    Anyways ramdisk sounds good, we will try this =)
     
  12. Offline

    fffizzz

    My next major question..
    This applies to linux users since windows blows :D

    You you guys use discard in fstab for TRIM? do you find it to be a performance hit or increase?
     
  13. Offline

    RogerWilco

    I don't have an SSD, but it sounds like a good idea, although given that if you have enough memory, the write cache might hide any gains?
    I've never looked at it in detail. These kind of performance tweaks can often only be really figured out by testing, as the whole thing is a stack of effects: file system - kernel - controller firmware - disk firmware.
     
  14. Offline

    XtenD

    bump , how long do SSD lives on 80+ players server? its sex
     
  15. Offline

    TheBeast808

    I don't get why everybody here has a hard on for SSDs. They are unneeded in most cases. Here is the read/write speed of my server with a HDD:
    Write:
    Code:
    dd if=/dev/zero of=blankimage bs=4k count=1000000
    1000000+0 records in
    1000000+0 records out
    4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 54.9813 s, 74.5 MB/s
    Read:
    Code:
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=4k count=1000000
    1000000+0 records in
    1000000+0 records out
    4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 1.16704 s, 3.5 GB/s
    Let's be honest here, that's more than enough. 74.5MB/s write is faster than 95% of server's need, and 3.5GB/s read is good enough for just about anything. My biggest ever maps were 1.5gb, how often does your HDD read the equivalent of the entire map twice in a single second? Never. Please note that both of these tests were done while I was running my server with players on it.

    However, SSDs do seem to be an effective placebo.
     
  16. Offline

    mindless728

    yes it helps a lot in both windows using TRIM and in Linux using the discard option
    @TheBeast808 using dd is meaningless when talking about the speed of your hard drive for minecraft as it uses sequential read/write, you need to test random 4k read/write and IOPS, and that is where mechanical hard drives fail and SSD's win at (unless comparing to a ram disk but that isn't really fair)
     
  17. Offline

    halley

    TheBeast808, your performance test is seriously lacking in real world. You just asked the device to stream all sectors in the order they appear on the device... which maximizes sustained speeds and minimizes disk seeks.

    Accessing files on a real server doing real work is not at all like that. Read ten sectors here, write five sectors there, read again somewhere else.

    Seeking to "the next sector" on an HDD cylinder takes very little time. Seeking to a new sector on a different cylinder takes much longer. The OS and your server stalls waiting for the heads to speed up to leave the old cylinder, the heads to slow to find the proper cylinder, the platters to turn to align the sector under the head, and then data can start flowing.

    Seeking to "the next sector" or "the most distant sector" on an SSD takes virtually the same amount of time: almost nothing. The only thing you're waiting for is the data, not the robotic mechanical crap that's in the way.
     
    NotYetRated likes this.
  18. Offline

    NotYetRated

    lol 3.5 GB/s? The theoretical limit of SATA3 is 750 MB/s.

    Not to mention everything Halley mentioned. Not to mention your hard drive is not writing sequentially. It is reading here, writing there, and reading another place, and so on and so on.

    Plus you completely miss the fact that SSD's have near instand access time, no hard drive has near that.
     
  19. Offline

    zipfe

  20. Offline

    NotYetRated

    lol was new to me so whats it matter
     
  21. Offline

    Nathan C

    It matters that you bumped an over 6 month old thread!

    Hopefully the moderators can give you an infraction for this.
     
  22. Offline

    TnT

    Locked. Necro post.
     
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